SiteRecordings

On the tops and slopes of Karoo sandstone features towards the south eastern end of the road route there are dispersed scatters of much less patinated Later Stone Age artefacts. Strewn across these surfaces are large quantities of amorphous weathered chunks of hornfels, some bearing flake scars. This landscape was clearly a source or ‘quarry’ area for hornfels, a metamorphic rock occurring in the contact zone between intrusive magma (dolerite) and shale beds. Impressive as the spreads of artefacts appear to be, they lack typological and contextual integrity: there is no preservation of organic traces (e.g. bone), and artefacts could have been displaced both vertically and spatially through many millennia of erosion and other natural processes. In these terms the vast numbers of stone tools to be seen at this site are considered, as an occurrence, to be of relatively low significance.