John Parkington

University of Cape Town | UCT · Department of Archaeology

Amongst the various technical traditions that characterize the Late Pleistocene in Southern Africa, the Howiesons Poort (HP) emerges as a distinctive phenomenon. It stimulates questions on the emergence of the so-called modern behaviours and the underlying cultural processes such as regionalization. The HP is also worldwide known for the precocity...

Diepkloof Rock Shelter (DRS) (32.387° S, 18.453° E) and Elands Bay Cave (EBC) (32.317° S, 18.318° E) are two Stone Age sites in the West Coast (Western Cape Province) of South Africa. The West Coast region of South Africa extends from Cape Town to the Olifants River mouth, from the Atlantic coast to the Cederberg Mountains. While the two sites are...

Here we make the case that the interment of twelve skeletons in a small Western Cape rock shelter should be viewed as a single event. We present evidence of the partially disarticulated, clearly overlapping arrangement of human remains and the radiocarbon dating results from the individuals that point to a hasty but coordinated burial at a critical...

Here we examine the tibial microstructure of modern and fossil angulate tortoises to assess the histology and growth from the late Miocene–early Pliocene, Pleistocene through to modern forms. The cross-sections of all the tibiae sampled revealed highly vascularized, uninterrupted, fibrolamellar bone tissue during early ontogeny, which suggests that...

Globally, fire is a primary agent for modifying environments through the long-term coupling of human and natural systems. In southern Africa, control of fire by humans has been documented since the late Middle Pleistocene, though it is unclear when or if anthropogenic burning led to fundamental shifts in the region's fire regimes. To identify poten...

The late Holocene was a period of cultural change along the west coast of South Africa, with widespread archaeological evidence for shifts in settlement patterns and economic activity. With these changes, we expect variability in the movement patterns of resident populations. In this proof-of-concept paper, we use lithic assemblages from Spring Cav...

Ethnographers and anthropologists have noted that no examples of group male initiation rituals have been recorded among the southern San, although they are known to have taken place further north in Angola, Botswana and Namibia. A detailed rock painting in the southwestern Cape Cederberg, South Africa, is composed in such a way that we argue that i...

From the form and composition of painted images of humans, elephants and ‘elephanthropes’ (elephant human therianthropes) from the northern Cederberg, we propose that elephants were considered as ‘other-than-human-persons’ by painters. This is supported by the role of elephants in San stories, the ethnography of relational ontologies among hunter-g...

In southern Africa, key technologies and symbolic behaviors develop as early as the later Middle Stone Age in MIS5. These innovations arise independently in various places, contexts and forms, until their full expression during the Still Bay and the Howiesons Poort. The Middle Stone Age sequence from Diepkloof Rock Shelter, on the West Coast of the...

Karoo Cosmos has several authors prominent in the fields of archaeology, astronomy, folklore and education. Chapters in the book intercalate with stories of cosmological significance, told by 19th century /xam-speaking San and their descendants. The publication places this cosmic understanding in its historic and archaeological context, by recogni...

The current study examined burnt and unburnt tibiae of angulate tortoises from the intermediate and late Howiesons Poort levels at Diepkloof Rock Shelter (DRS) of Western Cape, South Africa to ascertain heat‐induced osteohistological changes. Three types of bone damage caused by fire were recognised: i) external colour change in the bones but other...

Despite advances in our understanding of the geographic and temporal scope of the Paleolithic record, we know remarkably little about the evolutionary and ecological consequences of changes in human behavior. Recent inquiries suggest that human evolution reflects a long history of interconnections between the behavior of humans and their surroundin...

In southern Africa, key technologies and symbolic behaviors develop as early as the later Middle Stone Age in MIS5. These innovations arise independently in various places, contexts and forms, until their full expression during the Still Bay and the Howiesons Poort. The Middle Stone Age sequence from Diepkloof Rock Shelter, on the West Coast of the...

Identification of faunal remains at archaeological sites is often daunting for many archaeologists and in many cases involves the identification and interpretation of burnt bone. Thermally altered bones are key components of such sites, offer vital information on prehistoric cremation practices, as well as how prehistoric humans exploited animals f...

Shell middens, the residues of shellfish gathering, consumption, and disposal in the past, have attracted the attention of archaeologists for more than one hundred and fifty years. Although there has been a tendency to view these sites as simply waste heaps, it is increasingly clear that this is usually not the case and that, sometimes, spatially m...

In South Africa, key technologies and symbolic behaviors develop as early as the later Middle Stone Age in MIS5. These innovations arise independently in various places, contexts and forms, until their full expression during the Still Bay and the Howiesons Poort. We elaborate here on the Middle Stone Age sequence of Diepkloof Rock Shelter (South Af...

Previously we (Woodborne et al., 1995) and many others have attempted to pinpoint the seasonality of hunter gatherer site visits by assessing the ‘ages at death’ of animals with a restricted birth season. We used seal remains from two late Holocene sites along the Cape west coast. In this reevaluation, including larger samples of both modern and ar...

Antonieta Jerardino has raised a number of objections to our suggestion that very large shell middens along the Cape west coast are essentially processing debris. We recast the debate by using the difference between processing and domestic debris in these sites and argue that the logistical use of precise locations supports an interpretation of mas...

Silcrete heat treatment, along with a suit of other innovations, have been used to argue for an early onset of modern or complex behaviours in Middle Stone Age hominins. This practice was confined to South Africa’s southern and western Cape regions where it was continuously practised since the Still Bay industry. However, the exact moment that this...

Within the animal kingdom, carnivores occupied a unique place in prehistoric societies. At times predators or competitors for resources and shelters, anthropogenic traces of their exploitation, often for non-nutritional purposes, permeate the archaeological record. Scarce but spectacular depictions in Palaeolithic art confirm peoples’ fascination w...

The discard of shells in visible heaps, shell middens in our terminology, need not reflect the consumption locations, but may rather be field processing sites prior to the transport of edible flesh elsewhere, likely inland. The comparison of shell midden locations, sizes and contents from a well-studied section of the Cape west coast of South Afric...

The current study deduced the growth pattern and lifestyle habits of Chersina angulata based on bone histology and cross-sectional geometry of limb bones. Femora, humeri, and tibiae of seven different-sized individuals representing different ontogenetic stages were assessed to determine the interelement and intraskeletal histological variation with...

In 2007, in order to facilitate the building and operations of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), the Astronomy Geographic Advantage Act proclaimed a large ‘astronomy reserve’ in the central Upper Karoo, a roughly rhombic space covering some 120,000 square kilometres. As it happens, this geographic reserve coincides almost exactly with a region desc...

The current study investigates the limb-bone histology and cross-sectional geometry of the angulate tortoise, Chersina angulata in order to deduce their growth pattern and lifestyle habits. Femora, humeri and tibiae of seven individuals of different ontogenetic stages were studied to assess inter-elemental and intraskeletal histological variation w...

The painted undulating lines surrounding and linking elephants in Western Cape rock art Iwve previously been identified as entoptic visions seen by shaman/painters while in altered states. We argue tluit relevant Kalalmri Ju/'hoansi ethnography, Karoo /Xam accounts, details of the painted compositions, and elephant wildlife observations combine to...

We assembled genome-wide data from 16 prehistoric Africans. We show that the anciently divergent lineage that comprises the primary ancestry of the southern African San had a wider distribution in the past, contributing approximately two-thirds of the ancestry of Malawi hunter-gatherers ∼8,100–2,500 years ago and approximately one-third of the ance...

Stone Age surface assemblages are all too often neglected in favour of stratified, datable cave sequences, thus overlooking important insights into changing behavioural patterns at a broader scale. The Olifants River Valley (Clanwilliam, Western Cape Province, South Africa) presents a rich surface lithic record alongside excavated rockshelter occup...

Elands Bay Cave (EBC) is a key South African site allowing discussion of technological change and adaptations that occurred from the Upper Pleniglacial to the Holocene. In 2011, we set out a new field campaign aiming to clarify the nature and chronology of the earliest Robberg occupations at the site, a technocomplex whose appearance closely relate...

The Early Middle Stone Age (EMSA) of southern Africa represents a poorly defined period in terms of chronology, palaeoenvironments, subsistence strategies and technological traditions. This lack of understanding is directly related to the low number of EMSA deposits that have been excavated, but concomitantly, it also reflects the poor interest acc...

Elands Bay Cave provides the opportunity to characterize Holocene technologies and hunter-gatherers adaptations in the West Coast of South Africa. In this paper, we discuss the question of adhesives uses and manufactures by applying a biomolecular and technological analysis to three unpublished organic artefacts recovered from the 1970s excavation....

Elands Bay Cave (EBC) is one of the key sites for the analysis of the Late Pleistocene/Holocene record in southern Africa. It typifies an area of study, the West Coast of South Africa, which benefits from a long history of research, from the 1960s until today. The 2011 project of EBC was initiated within the framework of the Middle Stone Age (MSA)...

This article presents the results of the anatomical identification by scanning electron microscopy of wood charcoal from excavations in 2011 at Elands Bay Cave (EBC), South Africa. The samples are from Robberg Group D layers (18/19 ka cal BP); the Early Later Stone Age (LSA) Group F layers (22–24 ka cal BP), and the late Middle Stone Age (MSA) Grou...

In 2011 we conducted a field campaign at the site of Elands Bay Cave (EBC), on the West coast of South Africa, with the aim of clarifying the nature and chronology of its human Pleistocene occupations. In the present paper, we present the results of a chronology based on various materials and methods: radiocarbon (C14) dating was applied to 8 fragm...

Elands Bay Cave has been episodically occupied for many tens of thousands of years, but apparently always in fairly brief visits. It therefore contains an intermittent but sequentially organized record of environmental and behavioural events over a time period of perhaps 150 000 years. Here I look at the later Holocene record and assess what it rev...

Elands Bay Cave is a small coastal rock shelter formed in quartzite that contained up to ca. 3 m of anthropogenic and geogenic deposits with archaeological materials dating to the Middle Stone Age through Later Stone Age. Today, only the lower portion of the sedimentary sequence, comprising ca. 1.2 m of sediment remains. A geoarchaeological study o...

ELife digest The pattern of chemical reactions that break down the molecules that make our bodies is still fairly mysterious. Archaeologists and geologists hope that dead organisms (or artefacts made from them) might not decay entirely, leaving behind clues to their lives. We know that some molecules are more resistant than others; for example, fat...

Proteins persist longer in the fossil record than DNA, but the longevity, survival mechanisms and substrates remain contested. Here, we demonstrate the role of mineral binding in preserving the protein sequence in ostrich (Struthionidae) eggshell, including from the palaeontological sites of Laetoli (3.8 Ma) and Olduvai Gorge (1.3 Ma) in Tanzania....

Proteins persist longer in the fossil record than DNA, but the longevity, survival mechanisms and substrates remain contested. Here, we demonstrate the role of mineral binding in preserving the protein sequence in ostrich (Struthionidae) eggshell, including from the palaeontological sites of Laetoli (3.8 Ma) and Olduvai Gorge (1.3 Ma) in Tanzania....

'Living Landscape' is a community-based museum and schools curriculum project located in the small rural Western Cape town of Clanwilliam. Founded in 1812, and originally known as Jan Dissels Vallei, Clanwilliam was for much of the 19th century a frontier settlement, in which the politics of colonialism were played out against the magnificent backd...

Many attempts have been made to define and reconstruct the most plausible ecological and dietary niche of the earliest members of the human species. While earlier models emphasise big-game hunting in terrestrial, largely savannah environments, more recent scenarios consider the role of marine and aquatic foods as a source of polyunsaturated fatty a...

South Africa has in recent years gained increasing importance for our understanding of the evolution of 'modern human behaviour' during the Middle Stone Age (MSA). A key element in the suite of behaviours linked with modern humans is heat treatment of materials such as ochre for ritual purposes and stone prior to tool production. Until now, there h...

Since the discovery of the earliest dated sheep remains at Spoegriver Cave in Namaqualand, the Northern Cape has been recognised as a key area in documenting the emergence of herding in southern Africa. Nevertheless, the lifeways of prehistoric people in this region remain poorly understood. As a result of surveys conducted by the Archaeology Contr...

Hoedjiespunt 1 has long been recognized as one of the earliest Middle Stone Age (MSA) shell-bearing sites on the southwestern Cape coast. Together with the closely adjacent and roughly contemporary site at Sea Harvest, and the extensively documented site of Ysterfontein, Hoedjiespunt provides a record of MSA people’s adaptations to coastal environm...

Elands Bay and adjacent coastline near the mouth of the Verloren vlei on the South African Atlantic coast offered Later Stone Age foragers a variety of marine, estuarine, and terrestrial food resources. We suggest that strandloping (beachwalking or beachcombing) by latest Holocene foragers as a regular practice constituted an important component in...

In recent years, the Middle Stone Age (MSA) has moved into the centre of debate on the evolution of cultural modernity. Researchers have mainly focused on the distinctive Still Bay and Howiesons Poort techno-complexes. However, little has been done to investigate the earlier phases of the MSA. Here, we argue that the understanding of the complex cu...

Estimating the season of site occupation has strong relevance to archaeologists investigating Stone Age archaeological sites in the Western Cape of South Africa and elsewhere. Analysis of tooth eruption in a large sample of modern rock hyrax (Procavia capensis)for which the month of death is known indicates that some tooth eruption events occur ove...

Broken ostrich eggshells are commonly found in Middle Stone Age sites of southern Africa, presumably collected for food consumption, and later used as artefacts. At Diepkloof Rock Shelter, Middle Stone Age inhabitants used ostrich eggshells as a medium to convey abstract depictions. Since 1998, excavations at Diepkloof have recovered 408 engraved p...

In the course of recent excavations at Diepkloof Rock Shelter (South Africa), three human remains were found in the Middle Stone Age layers. These human remains are two pedal phalanges (intermediate and distal) from a fifth ray, which belong to the same individual, and a deciduous first lower molar. The layers in which they were found represent the...

This introduction presents the background to the present research project at Diepkloof Rock Shelter, initiated in 1998. It is followed by a series of original papers that were presented in November 2010 at the join 13th PAA Congress (Panafrican Association of Prehistory and Associated Disciplines) and 20th conference of SAfA (Society of Africanist...

Diepkloof Rock Shelter offers an exceptional opportunity to study the onset and evolution of both Still Bay (SB) and Howiesons Poort (HP) techno-complexes. However, previous age estimates based on luminescence dating of burnt quartzites (Tribolo et al., 2009) and of sediments (Jacobs et al., 2008) were not in agreement. Here, we present new lumines...

New excavations at the Middle Stone Age (MSA) open-air site of Hoedjiespunt 1 (HDP1) on the west coast of South Africa advance our understanding of the evolution of coastal adaptations in Homo sapiens. The archaeological site of HDP1 dates to the last interglacial and consists of three phases of occupation, each containing abundant lithic artifacts...

Past archaeological investigations into the impact of shellfish gathering by hunter-gatherers on shellfish stocks, particularly on shellfish size, generally have emphasized long-term change visible in stratigraphic sequences. We propose that short-term exploitation of shellfish by Later Stone Age hunter-gatherers who briefly inhabited the Dunefield...

Very large late Holocene shell middens (‘megamiddens’, some over 10 000 m3 in extent) along a 20 km section of the west coast of South Africa provide a particular interpretative challenge in determining whether they result from residential visits or from logistical processing of shellfish for transport and consumption elsewhere. The latter interpre...

Introduction Changes Climate Change A New Narrative References

Ongoing debates about the emergence of modern human behavior, however defined, regularly incorporate observations from the later part of the southern African Middle Stone Age and emphasize the early appearance of artifacts thought to reflect symbolic practice. Here we report a large sample of 270 fragments of intentionally marked ostrich eggshell f...

The Karoo region of southern Africa is an ancient landform with characteristic rock strata, topography, vegetation and climate. A feature of this landscape are the many engraved images, sometimes called petroglyphs, which were made by pre-colonial hunter gatherers. This book illustrates the contexts and contents of this rock art, and the authors de...

San rock paintings in the Cape, South Africa, are residual but readable images that contain some intentionally ambiguous figures. Male and female figures were almost never ambiguous at the time of painting but many have become so, after much loss of detail. The boundary between animals and people, by contrast, is often ambiguous with therianthropic...

We have excavated and mapped just over 850 m2, of late precolonial campsites at Dunefield Midden some 2 km north of the mouth of the Verloren Vlei, Western Cape Province, South Africa. Dated to between 1000 and 500 years ago, these scatters of shell, bone and artefacts are highly resolved records of Later Stone Age strandloping activities. We have...

About 2,000 years ago domestic animals, first sheep and later cattle, and domestic plants, principally sorghum and millet, spread to Southern Africa from areas to the north where they were originally domesticated some thousands of years earlier. The retrieval of the remains of these domesticates has allowed archaeologists to develop narratives that...

New excavations have been undertaken at Diepkloof Rock Shelter (DRS; South Africa) since 1999. It is one of the very few sites where Howiesons Poort and Stillbay assemblages can be collected from the same archaeological sequence. These Middle Stone Age techno-complexes are particularly interesting for their affinities with the much younger Later St...

The vast spaces of the Karoo region of southern Africa abound with images pecked, incised or engraved onto rock surfaces. These landscape markings were created in the pre-colonial period by San hunter gatherers. San Rock Engravings explores the visual legacy of these ancient artists, the signs they left on the land and the meanings that could be at...

The Dunefield Midden site, located on the Atlantic coast of South Africa, contains abundant, well-preserved animal bones and other archaeological materials believed to reflect multiple short occupations by hunter-gatherer peoples several centuries ago. The bones of small mammals, constituting a subset of a large assemblage of vertebrate remains, pr...

The archaeological sequence at Diepkloof Rock Shelter, Western Cape Province, South Africa, provides significant clarification of the chrono-cultural patterns of the Middle Stone Age (MSA) in southern Africa. The richness of the archaeological remains provides the opportunity to document the diachronic changes that occurred within the MSA, includin...

This paper provides an overview of the micromammalian palaeocommunities found in fossil bearing palaeontological and archaeological west coast sites dating from the Mio-Pliocene, as represented by the site of Langebaanweg ‘E’ Quarry, and other sites dating from the late Middle Pleistocene, until the late Holocene. Recent excavations at Langebaanweg...

Stillbay and Howiesons Poort stone tool techno-complexes. South African Middle Stone Age chronology and its implications. In the midst of the South African MSA, the Stillbay and Howiesons Poort technological complexes are marked by a set of ‘precocious’ indicators of modern character of the sort that characterize the industries that follow them. Un...

The palaeontological site of Hoedjiespunt 1 (HDP1) represents a fossilized hyaena lair. A rich mammalian fauna, including four hominid teeth, has been recovered from the site. Micromammals were recovered from the same sediments as the larger fauna. Taphonomic analysis suggests that the micromammal assemblages from HDP1 were accumulated by a barn ow...

RECENT HISTORICAL CONTEXT, EXTINCT CULTURAL EXPRESSION Der Mond als Shuh: Zeichnungen der San: The Moon as Shoe: Drawings of the San. Edited by MIKLÓS SZALAY. Zurich: Scheidegger und Spiess, 2002. Pp. 311. SFr 98; €65 (ISBN 3-85881-138-6). - - Volume 45 Issue 2 - JOHN PARKINGTON

The authors and three students met for workshops on several occasions in Cape Town and Stellenbosch with the goal of defining a taxonomic system for chipped stone artefacts that can be applied to materials from the Early, Middle and Later Stone Age. The motivation for defining a 'unified taxonomy' stems from the need to develop a system for classif...