Cedric Poggenpoel

A Howiesons Poort tradition of engraving ostrich eggshell containers dated to 60,000 years ago at Diepkloof Rock Shelter, South Africa

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 from the Howiesons Poort at Diepkloof Rock Shelter, Western Cape, South Africa. Dating from ≈60,000 years ago, these pieces attest to an engraving tradition that is the earliest reliable evidence of what is a widespread modern practice. These abstract linear depictions were made on functional items (eggshell containers), which were curated and involved in daily hunter-gatherer life. The standardized production of repetitive patterns, including a hatched band motif, suggests a system of symbolic representation in which collective identities and individual expressions are clearly communicated, suggesting social, cultural, and cognitive underpinnings that overlap with those of modern people.

The technology of bone tool fabrication in the south-western Cape, South Africa

Abstract Bone tools are to be found in almost every excavation of Later Stone Age sites in southern Africa. A bone tool fabrication area was identified at Kasteelberg on the Vredenberg Peninsula where the entire process of production can be seen. The paper describes the process of bone preparation, experimental work on bone, and compares the finished product from Kasteelberg and other sites in the Cape with ethnographic arrow‐points made by San hunters.

The Barrack Street well: images of a Cape Town household in the nineteenth century

This paper describes the results of excavation of well deposits from Barrack Street, Cape Town. The sequence starts with an assemblage dated to the late eighteenth century and continues, with a clear stratigraphy, until the late nineteenth century. Artefact assemblages reflect changes from a domestic to a commercial building, and from the period when the Cape was under the control of the Dutch East India Company through the establishment of the Cape as a British colony.

The chronology of Oudepost I, Cape, as inferred from an analysis of clay pipes

Abstract The excavation of Oudepost I, a Dutch East India Company outpost on the southwest coast of South Africa (1669–1732), reveals evidence of colonial-indigenous interactions in this early period of European settlement. The site revealed very little stratigraphy and a complex taphonomic history. The chronological integrity of Oudepost I is assessed through a comprehensive analysis of its major artefactual component, namely, a large collection of white clay tobacco pipes. The data from this analysis are integrated with field observations of the building sequence, with findings relating to residues, and with information from documentary sources to infer an occupational history of the site. The results explicate the potential importance of pipes in historic sites, as key elements in decoding occupational sequences.

Strandloping as a Resource-Gathering Strategy in the Cape, South African Holocene Later Stone Age: The Verloren Vlei Record

ABSTRACT 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 their repertoire of subsistence activities. Washed-up mussels, seals, birds, whales, and other recently dead animals would have been available to such strandlopers. We distinguish strandloping as a subsistence practice from the procurement of living prey, including shellfish, mammals, birds, and other animals. The Holocene archaeological record of the Elands Bay area suggests changes through time in resource use, and these changes appear to be recognizable in patterns of shellfish gathering. During the latest part of the Holocene, between about 1,500 and 300 years ago, subsistence practices display a distinctive character that perhaps conforms more strongly than previously to what we conceive of as strandloping.