C. Garth Sampson

Through Thick and Thin: Early Pottery in Southern Africa

Conventional wisdom has it that ceramic technology reached southernmost Africa with or just ahead of the so-called Iron Age, Bantu migrations of ca 2000 years ago. A review of the evidence suggests that the earliest ceramics in the subcontinent are thin-walled and smooth surfaced vessels, technologically quite distinct from the first thick-walled, coarse surfaced “Iron Age” ware of the subcontinent, and predating the latter by two to four centuries. There is no published evidence of a thin-walled ware to the north of the Zambezi, although undated examples are known from coastal Angola. It seems unlikely that the thin-walled wares in southernmost Africa represent a residue of some mass human migration in the distant past. It is more likely that the art of making fired clay pots reached the subcontinent through archaeologically invisible infiltrations by small groups, perhaps peripatetic artisans; or it may have been invented locally.

Amphibians from the Acheulean site at Duinefontein 2 (Western Cape, South Africa)

Abundant amphibian remains were encountered at Duinefontein 2, a late mid-Quaternary fossil site with Acheulean artifacts. The amphibians are distributed in concentric bands that suggest shoreline lags around the southeast rim of an interdunal pond, part of which has been exposed by very extensive excavations. The pond community was dominated by ranids and pipids, both requiring less than a meter depth of open water. Burrowing species such as toads, rain frogs, and sand frogs were present but rare, as were reed frogs. This suggests a thin rim of damp but poorly vegetated sand. Frequency and size changes suggest that the pond became shallower at a time when large mammal remains were proliferating on the adjacent land surface. The evolutionary status of the eight recovered amphibian taxa cannot be addressed since the osteology of most of their modern analogs still awaits systematic study.

A GIS analysis of the Zeekoe Valley Stone Age archaeological record in South Africa

The conversion of the Zeekoe Valley Archaeological Project survey data to a GIS format allows rapid and accurate analysis of this large hunter-gatherer database. During the 16-month survey 13,866 prehistoric Stone Age sites were recorded and plotted on aerial photographs. These site locations and archaeological data can now be analysed in a manner never possible before the conversion. The distribution and abundance of sites spanning over ~700,000 years of occupation demonstrates how human hunting and gathering societies organized themselves spatially on an African landscape. These results show how these different groups positioned themselves in different locations especially in relation to water sources in the semi-desert Karoo. These distributions show flexible patterns of spatial organization through the prehistoric past.