Heritage Cases

One of our short-term aims is to excavate deposits on the South profile of excavation 4A in Members 3 BS, 3 WA, and 1 RGBS to better understand the lithic technology and people represented at the site for the period currently attributed to the Howiesons Poort. See Figure 1 for a plan of the cave sowing the squares discussed here. The deposits that span the period 82,000–54,000 years ago that we have excavated (Members 3 BS, 3 WA, 1 RGBS in excavation squares E117 N108 and N109 on the North profile), have yielded only two possible Howiesons Poort stone tools, and this deserves further investigation. We plan to expand excavations in the Early Later Stone Age deposits in excavation 4A on the South profile in order to verify the results and hypothesis stemming from two papers that we published showing that elements of a material culture similar to that found at Later Stone Age sites emerged in the region 44,000 years ago (d’Errico et al., 2012a; Villa et al., 2012). They take the form of ostrich eggshell beads, bone arrowheads, a poison applicator, a lump of beeswax, a digging stick, microliths that were hafted with Podocarpus tree resin and a bored stone, probably used as a weight on a digging stick, to mention a few. Our strategy is to expand excavations with the aim of finding a wider range of cultural innovations for this time period. We plan to excavate two large ancient pits, one flat and the other round, which are exposed on the North face of excavation 3A rear, in squares N108 E114-115 in Member 5 BS. Member 5 BS is dated by Electron Spin Resonance to between 161,000 and 144,000 years ago. We are going to evaluate different hypotheses based on their size and shape; including that the bowl-shaped one may preserve traces of use as a roasting pit, and that the rectangular one contains human remains. We plan to expand excavations along the North section of excavation 3A rear in N109 E118 as only one quarter of the square has been excavated. Excavations in this square will serve to remove a column of unexcavated deposit, which will provide a continuous lateral profile of the sequence from the youngest to the oldest members. In accordance with our interest in archaeological evidence of complex cognition before and after 100 thousand years ago, we will continue with existing excavations on the North wall of excavation 3A rear, which spans Members 4 WA (~120 ka) to 3 BS (~60 ka) with the aim of identifying evidence of innovation and modern behaviour. We also want to continue excavating the stratigraphic sequence to retrieve more lithic artefacts because our sample size is small. Our current lithic sample suggests the need for a revision of the cultural attributions made by Beaumont, and this requires a larger sample size. An increased sample size will also enable us to look for regional features and affinities with other Middle Stone Age sites in sub-Saharan Africa. With an increased sample of all types of artefacts, future work will investigate the artefact density throughout the sequence, based on plotted artefacts and non-plotted bucket finds. An increased sample size will also enable us to produce a high-resolution multi-proxy (charcoal, wood, pollen, phytoliths, fauna) record of environmental change, and contemporaneous human behaviour that extends from MIS 7 (243 ka) to MIS 2 (29 ka). This will contribute to our understanding of the impact of climate change on subsistence strategies in this region and provide a framework for our understanding of the emergence of behavioural modernity. I attach a manuscript under review that reports on our progress and states our planned research in the Conclusion, under research perspectives.