Steven A. Brandt

An archaeological survey of the tropical highlands of Kafa, Southwestern Ethiopia

The cool, moist, tropical highlands of southwest Ethiopia contrast dramatically with arid environments in the rest of the Horn of Africa. They have seen little archaeological research due to their remote location, wet conditions, and acidic soils and volcanic rocks thought to harbor few shelters or open-air sites capable of organic preservation. In 2004–2005, the Kafa Archaeological Project documented 27 shelters of diverse height, configuration, and formation processes; ten merited test excavations. Three have late Holocene cultural deposits, while another has high densities of ceramics, lithics, bone, and dried plant remains extending back to the middle Holocene. These sites suggest that the tropical highlands of Kafa contain numerous previously occupied caves and rockshelters with good organic preservation. Therefore, they have the potential of 1) establishing the region’s first Holocene cultural chronology that can be compared with better-studied areas of the Horn and eastern Africa; 2) contributing to a regional environmental record; and 3) reconstructing hunter-gatherer, farming and/or herding economics and social organization during a period of increasing socio-political complexity.

Lithic Technological Approaches to the African Late Pleistocene Later Stone Age.

I n 1929, South African archeologists J. Goodwin and C. van Riet Lowe established the Later Stone Age (LSA) to differentiate southern African Holocene “cultures” such as “Wilton” from those of the late Pleistocene Middle Stone Age (MSA). The material culture of the LSA was then, and to some extent still is characterized by ground and flaked stone “microlithic” tools and other artifacts synonymous with the ethnographically documented Bushmen. In the following decades, archeologists subsumed other subSaharan African industries, such as “Somaliland Wilton,” within the LSA, even though those industries had little if anything to do with the Bushmen and were not necessarily of Holocene age. By the 1970s, radiocarbon dating demonstrated that some LSA sites were late Pleistocene in age. To some archeologists, this suggested that the seemingly rapid technological changes between the MSA and the late Pleistocene LSA (LP LSA) could be equated with the evolution of Homo sapiens and the appearance of modern human behavior. However, sub-Saharan African archeological research in the 1980s and 1990s showed that the MSALSA “transition” was much more complicated and asynchronous, as well as untethered to hominin turnover. African late Pleistocene research in the twenty-first century has further narrowed the temporal, technological, and definitional gaps between the MSA and LP LSA. This research has also shown greater lithic technological variability within these major divisions. Consequently, archeologists have questioned what the LSA actually represents and what its distinguishing behavioral characteristics are. WORKSHOP OVERVIEW