John Parkington

METHOD Reid (1978) discusses in detail the field methods used in the project. The somewhat friable nature of the floors and hearths dictated the sampling methods. Using a commercial masonry cutter, slots were cut into the material so that a square aluminium ...

When Wilhelm Bleek and his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd interviewed Xam (San) informants in Cape Town in the 1870s they established an archive of unparalleled significance for pre-colonial historical studies in Southern Africa. The near verbatim records of stories told by ...

Radiocarbon-dated elevated marine deposits and the record of anthropogenic and natural debris in archaeological deposits on the west coast of South Africa indicate that significant coastal remodelling has taken place in the past 4300 years in response to sea level change. Geological and archaeological investigation of elevated deposits of sub-fossil shell, abandoned lagoons, and washover bars has shown that many

Men, Women, and Eland: Hunting and Gender among the San of Southern Africa John Parkington THEMES IN SAN EXPRESSIVE CULTURE In the 1870s,//kabbo (fig. 7.1) was a middle-aged man serving a sentence at the Breakwater Prison in Cape Town and dictating his ...

... The majority of the papers (Hiscock, Mulvaney, Ulm et al.) are within the Australian context, with a strong emphasis on the social mechanisms underlying the various processes and their ... Brian Fagan Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, CA, 2006, 175pp, ISBN 1-59874-005-9 ...

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 reveals about marine food exploitation by hunter gatherers and later pastoralist groups. Because we have similar records from several other small caves, rock shelters and open sites around the Verloren Vlei and the associated shoreline, we can recognise periods of common use and disuse and understand the intermittent and changing use of the local shoreline resources over the past 5000 years.

Download a branded Cambridge Journals Online toolbar (for IE 7 only). What is this? ... Add Cambridge Journals Online as a search option in your browser toolbar. What is this? ... RECENT HISTORICAL CONTEXT, EXTINCT CULTURAL EXPRESSION Der Mond als Shuh: ...

... In this paper I challenge what I take to be the most widely promoted view of the age of HP assemblages, particularly at Border Cave (Beaumont et al. 1978; Butzer et al. ... Sehonghong; 25. Ha Soloja; 26. Rose Cottage; 27. Border Cave; 28. Lion Cavern; 29. Heuningneskrans; 30. ...

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, present intriguing patterns with respect to spatial distributions of bones and of cutmarked bones. Pronounced differences in the spatial distributions of bones between small carnivores and small noncarnivores probably indicate differences in how the site occupants used the carcasses of these animals.

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) Group H-I-J layers (35–39ka cal BP). Noticeable differences in the vegetation are present in LSA layers, which have more diverse thicket elements represented in Groups D and F than in Group H-I-J layers—with their heavier reliance on Afromontane and mesic thicket taxa during the late MSA. Published charcoal results from previous excavations at EBC chart a progressive change over time from xeric thicket and asteraceous shrubland vegetation, through proteoid fynbos and general thicket to mesic thicket, riverine woodland and proteoid fynbos, ultimately to Afromontane forest. Climatic or soil moisture factors may have played a significant part and contributed to some or all of the taxa having very different phytogeographical distributions compared to their modern counterparts, but is also necessary to consider to what extent the people using EBC at different times might have collected (and selected) woody resources from a mosaic of vegetational communities, some local, some far away.

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 fragments of charcoal whereas luminescence dating methods (OSL, IRSL and TL) were applied to quartz and feldspar grains extracted from 5 sediment samples and to 4 burnt fragments of quartzite rock. For the upper part of the sequence, the luminescence ages are either in agreement with or slightly younger than the C14 ages. The results suggest that the upper part of the EBC sequence extends from MIS3 to MIS2, including successively late Middle Stone Age (starting from 38 ± 3 ka), Early Later Stone Age (ending 22 ka ago) and Robberg occupations (starting 19.1 ± 0.3 ka ago). The lower part of the EBC sequence, associated with Early Middle Stone Age assemblages, remains poorly constrained: the sediment sample taken above could be a mixture of different layers and could not be dated, whereas OSL ages for sediments below are 236 ± 23 ka and only one stone sample could be dated within this layer (83 ± 14 ka). Considering both the chronological and techno-cultural points of view, the EBC sequence is complementary to the Diepkloof sequence, located less than 20 km eastward.

In this article we remember Norbert by writing about elephant images from the Cederberg region, in a way that we think he would have appreciated. We believe that San artists embody and display a deep understanding of animal ecology and behaviour. There are over 200 shelters in the Cederberg which have reference to paintings of elephants. We have visited 50 of these shelters and have recorded total of 230 elephant tracings which have been compared with the images of African Elephants. The original research methods used by Norbert Aujoulat were an inspiration for this study. The comparison of the above tracings and photographs reveal a remarkable degree of realism in the art of the San. To try and get a better understanding as to why elephants were the chosen subject matter of the San artists, we embarked on a program to study the compositions of the various paintings, focusing on the painted San figures, the deliberately painted lines, and the handprints that surround the elephants, and while doing so, we studied the characteristics and behaviour of elephants simultaneously with research into known San behaviour, ethnology, mythology and folklore. Our conclusion is that the symbolic art work of the San painters should be regarded as thoroughly practical in effect. Résumé : Observer et peindre les éléphants : l'art pariétal San de la région du Cederberg (Afrique du Sud). Nous voulons rendre ici un hommage à Norbert Aujoulat en commentatnt d'une manière qu'il aurait appréciée des représentations pariétales d'éléphants de la région du Cedergerg. Nous pensons que les artistes San ont intégré et affiché une profonde compréhension de l'écologie et du comportement des animaux. Il y a plus de 230 abris dans le Cederberg présentant des peintures d'éléphants. Un total de 95 tracés d'éléphants de différentes compositions a été comparé avec les images de l'éléphant d'Afrique. Les méthodes originales utilisées par Norbert Aujoulat ont été une source d'inspiration pour cette étude. La comparaison des tracés et des photos ci-dessous révèlent un remarquable degré de réalisme dans l'art San. Pour essayer de mieux comprendre les raisons pour lesquelles les éléphants furent le thème choisi par les artistes San, nous avons entrepris une étude de la composition des différents tableaux, orientée plus particulièrement sur les silhouettes San peintes et les lignes et empreintes de mains entourant délibérément les éléphants. Parallèlement, nous avons étudié les caractéristiques et le comportement des éléphants en même temps que nous avons développé une recherche sur le comportement, l'ethnologie, la mythologie et le folklore San. Notre conclusion est que l'oeuvre d'art symbolique des peintres San doit être considérée comme essentiellement pragmatique.

In this paper, we assess the nutritional value of some marine and terrestrial food resources available to Middle Stone Age hunter-gatherers in the Western Cape of South Africa with respect to an important macronutrient (protein) and an essential micronutrient (iron) and introduce a framework for assessing the relative utility of marine and terrestrial resources. Whilst the ability to extract nutrients from the environment has always been a lynchpin in archaeologists' reconstructions of human evolution, a recent paradigm shift has recognized the role of marine resources in encephalization. Nutritional research indicates that marine ecosystems are the best source for long chain polyunsaturated fatty acids essential for proper brain development, and excavations at securely dated archaeological sites in South Africa provide firm evidence for the exploitation of marine resources by Middle Stone Age hunter-gatherers from at least Marine Isotope Stage 5 (130 ka), and possibly even earlier. Because marine molluscs are abundant, predictably located and easily harvested, they would have been readily available to all members of the community, in contrast to terrestrial resources. The improving archaeological record gives important clues to resource choice, but many more nutritional observations are needed to determine the extent to which marine resources could have met the nutrient requirements of prehistoric people. Our observations indicate that marine and terrestrial fauna are both excellent sources of protein, and that marine molluscs have higher iron concentrations than we expected for invertebrate fauna. We calculate the number of individual food items from a selection of marine and terrestrial species needed to provide the protein and iron requirements of a hypothetical group of hunter-gatherers, identify contrasts in peoples' requirements for and access to nutrients and resources, and discuss the implications for prehistoric subsistence strategies and human evolution.

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 interpretation is preferred here and is consistent with stable carbon isotopic readings on coastal human burials and site contents that illustrate that groups visited specific localities, collected and dried black mussels and then transported and consumed the dried product
inland. The sizes and contents of these large middens contrasts sharply with those of unquestionably residential residues from earlier and later time periods. This approach is supported with reference to the ethnographically described processing and consumption of mongongo nuts by 20th century San of the Kalahari.

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 Stone Age facies, and their association with evidence

Although rock paintings occur in profusion throughout the landscape of the western Cape, the landscape itself is seldom depicted in the paintings. In this apparent contradiction we see the possibility of describing a relationship between pre-colonial artists and landscape ...

... Journal Title: South African Journal of Science; Volume: Volume 99; Issue: Issue 5 & 6; Publication Date: 2003; Pages: p.243 - 247; Authors: John Parkington; ISSN: 00382353; Abstract: Read this article. For subscription and additional information please contact us on: ...

The interpretation of part human part animal figures is critical to the understanding of southern African rock paintings, as is the meaning ascribed to the many depictions of eland. The conventional view is that these image patterns derive from the essentially shamanistic character of the art. Here I argue that the conflation of human and animal is a far more