South African Archaeological Society

The Later Stone Age of Southernmost Africa by Janette DeaconReview by: C. Garth SampsonThe South African Archaeological Bulletin, Vol. 40, No. 141 (Jun., 1985), pp. 56-58Published by: South African Archaeological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3887998 .

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56 The South African Archaeological Bulletin

REVIEW ARTICLE

DEACON, Janette. 1984. The Later Stone Age of southernmost Africa. Cambridge Monographs in African Archaeology No 12. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports. 441 pp, 160 figs, 79 tables, 2 appendices. Price approx. R40.00.

This long-awaited monograph derives from the doctoral dissertation written by one of southern Africa's most distinguished Stone Age scholars and is the culmination of over two decades of research, reflection and debate. Although it is essentially built around the analysis of three deep stone artefact sequences excavated from Nelson Bay Cave by Richard Klein and Ray Inskeep, from Boom- plaas Cave excavated by H. J. Deacon and from Kangkara Cave excavated by H. J. Deacon and Richard Klein, it is also a major venture into both the method and theory of Stone Age research in southern Africa. Its readership will be mainly professional archaeolo- gists and advanced students, but others with a general interest in South African prehistory are urged to read the more discursive chapters, particularly those which survey past environments and the Later Stone Age (LSA) sequence. The main body of this work, however, is not for beginners. Even seasoned stratigraphers and artefact-tabulators will find it challenging in places.

The monograph makes three important contributions. It offers a synthesis of the small but very widely scattered body of literature on climatic modelling and late Quaternary palaeoenvironments in the southern Cape Province. Next, it describes the long LSA artefact sequence from the deep Boomplaas Cave (not available in the literature elsewhere) and compares this with the sequences from the other two sites. Thirdly, it presents for the first time a full panorama of Janette Deacon's current thinking on a wide range of problems and topics, many of which have not seen the light of print before. While most of her interpretative positions are known to professional archae- ologists with some sort of commitment to LSA studies, readers with more marginal interests in this confusing and much-debated period (now thought to cover the last 20 000 years) will be less familiar with her views. It is good, then, to have many of these in print for the first time as they will serve as a counterbalance to various rival interpreta- tions currently available and jostling each other for the centre-stage of our attention.

Unhappily the editing and proofing of the volume is not all that it might be, with several typos, missing scales, over-reduced tables and a few indecipherable graphs. While these have mainly irritation value and are normal to works of this size and complexity, my copy has the first two pages of the Conclusions chapter missing from the binding, and the third is simply a blank page. As always, the author's control of the vast array of facts which comes into play in such studies is impeccable. My other regret is that there is no Index.

After a short introduction the monograph opens with the usual historical review and passes rapidly to the proposition that two paradigms have developed in LSA studies, each providing a frame- work within which observed changes in artefact design might be explained. One of these, described as the "successive wave" theory after a casual phrase used by C. van Riet Lowe (1929:187-188), sees migration as the chief explanatory tool. This has later been modified to accommodate diffusionism. The second and rival paradigm that has arisen is that of environmental stimulus which causes subsistence shifts in local populations. It is at this point that one of the author's basic tenets emerges: migrations are too difficult to detect in the archaeological record, and are consequently not to be considered further. Although never spelled out this baldly, it is obvious that the second paradigm is for her and the possibility of migrations is not raised again in the monograph, which proceeds to a rigorous testing of the environmental-stimulus approach.

The procedures adopted are entirely sensible: examine in detail the changes in artefact technology, design and raw material use over the past 20 millennia in three reasonably complete sequences; isolate periods of rapid and/or gradual change in these; then enquire whether or not such changes coincide with periods of environmental change, either rapid or slow. Finally, ascertain whether cause-and- effect relationships can be proposed between the two sets of changes. The goals of this experiment are admirably constrained and clear-cut,

the sequences are all from well-controlled excavations using the most up-to-date standards, and the absolute chronologies and associated ecofacts are among the best available in the subcontinent.

The first step in the experiment is to erect the environmental framework within which the three sequences are to be tested. Having allowed for the differences in the local environment between the three sites (Boomplaas and Kangkara, being inland sites, are in drier intermontane settings while Nelson Bay Cave is at the coast), the palaeocimatic record of each is pieced together with whatever is available. A remarkable variety of data-bases is drawn upon to build up a picture of environmental change during the past 20 millennia in the southern Cape. Temperature fluctuations derived from Antarctic ice-core records are compared with those from deep-sea core records and with terrestrial records such as the speleothem sequence from Cango Caves and the micromammal changes recorded at Boomplaas Cave. Precipitation changes are shown to be inevitably linked to temperature changes in a most ingenious fashion (fig. 10) by compar- ing dewpoint temperature values for scores of different South African weather stations with their mean monthly precipitable water values. This demonstrates overwhelmingly that lower temperatures yield less precipitable water. The implications of this are further explored via sea level changes and consequent changes in shoreline configuration. The terrestrial record is more fragmented but is derived from charcoal studies, pollen sequences, micro- and macro-mammalian studies, as well as cave sediment analyses. The conclusions of all these separate projects converge to suggest that the southern Cape was considerably colder and drier than today at the start of the selected study period around 20 000 -18 000 B.P., warmed steadily between 17 000- 14 000 B.P. with warmer and wetter conditions prevailing between 14 000 - 12 000 B.P., drying slightly to 10 000 B.P., then stabilizing and roughly modem conditions with a slight temperature increase between 7000- 5000 B.P. and a cooler, drier event after 2000 B.P. The most contentious aspect of this framework is the 14 000 B.P. date for the post-glacial warming event - some two millennia earlier than it is known to occur in the northern hemi- sphere. This is further complicated by the apparent three-millennium lag in the response of the larger mammals (small browsers increase at the expense of large grazers) to documented changes in the vegeta- tion around Boomplaas. These discrepancies will inevitably raise eyebrows which will not settle back into position until comparable data are unearthed elsewhere.

Next comes the arduous business of documenting artefact changes in the three sequences. After a concise summary of the stratigraphies, chronology and organic associations, the heart of this monograph is reached at the colossal and daunting Chapter 5 entitled Artefact Analyses. Here the reader must pick his way through 84 graphs and 55 tables, some of which are truly complex. It is at this point that another of the author's firmly held positions comes into play: the "Later Stone Age" is a single technological tradition gradually accreting traits over 20 millennia (see p. 3). It is not to be viewed, therefore, as a sequence of "industries" as suggested by the Burg- Wartenstein Symposium (Bishop & Clark 1967:893), and the labels Robberg, Albany/Oakhurst and Wilton, which are used in earlier literature on these sites (e.g. Deacon 1978), are eschewed. It only emerges at the end of the monograph that one of the original intentions of this analysis was to test the validity of these terms (p. 366), which are finally confirmed. Behind this stance lies the ultra- conservative view of typological classification that:

a great deal more information is needed before we can hope to identify identity-conscious Later Stone Age groups by their stone artefacts, or predict the age of a sample of artefacts from the relative frequency, size and shape of tools (p. 303). Thus Chapter 5 seeks to find trends in the 20 000-year long

accumulations with nothing more to guide the reader than the look- alike acronyms for sedimentary units - 11 of them at Nelson Bay

S. Afr. archaeol. Bull. 40: 56-58. 1985

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The South African Archaeological Bulletin 57

Cave, another 11 at Kangkara and 16 more from Boomplaas. Heaven help the unwary reader who momentarily confuses the RBL with the BRL for he will never find his way back out of the labyrinth of this analysis. Those brave enough to tackle this data base are urged to take time out to replace the acronyms with consecutive numbers from the top of each sequence, and to annotate all the point-plots on the graphs with these same numbers by referring to the duly adjusted tables. All graphs are plotted on a time-axis divided into millennia rather than a layer-sequence axis divided into strata. Some, like Figure 30. seem to be out of sync by as much as a millennium, and layouts are not standardized - time being on the horizontal axis of some, lapsing from left to right or from right to left, while others have time on the vertical axis, lapsing either up or down the scale. Readers may want to draw some of their own graphs from the tables if they want to "see" the composition of a particular assemblage from one layer. Remember, this is an analysis of attribute trends through time and not of whole assemblages. I confess to making little headway myself until I broke the author's rule of silence and raided the earlier literature on the sites to find out which industrial labels went with which acronyms, then cheated by carving up all the tables and graphs into Robberg, Albany/Oakhurst and Wilton blocks. The author remains faithful to her self-imposed rule, however, even in the discussion of the various analyses. This often has cumbersome results, with the Albany/Oakhurst becoming "units dating between about 12 000 and about 8000 B.P." (p. 97), or "the middle five units of the LSA sequence" (p. 91) and so on. One cannot help wondering if so stringently applied empiricism is not self-defeating if the poor reader is lost in the process.

It is also important that the reader be aware that the typology applied in the analysis is a very characteristic "lumper's" typology with the shortest possible list of categories, each with many different attributes (metrics, retouch position, etc.) to be analysed separately. One inevitable by-product of all such typologies is that compared assemblages end up looking more alike than they really are and must be teased apart again to something approaching their actual typologi- cal distance by attribute comparisons. The first casualties of this approach are all the types (i.e. attribute constellations) which are represented by only a few specimens in the artefact samples being analysed. In this study the chief victims are items submerged under the large, medium and small scrapers which are further lumped in the analysis into just scrapers. This tactic has collapsed a variety of tool designs, not all of which need be scrapers, into the same class. As some of these designs are quite sensitive time-markers in sequences elsewhere in the South African interior, opportunities for cross-site comparisons are drowned out by the classificatory method itself. The attribute list for scrapers is not sufficient to isolate properly these specimens which make up unique combinations of attributes. Indeed, the author has her own doubts about the integrity of the scraper class (p. 282), and it is further to her credit that very detailed and clear descriptions of her types in Appendix 1 and of her attribute lists in Appendix 2 make it possible to see where poorly represented types may be buried.

For anyone who has visited the excavations at Nelson Bay Cave and Boomplaas and marvelled at the huge volumes of sediment which have been processed it will come as a disappointment to learn that so very few formal tools have been recovered from all but the uppermost layers. Now, small samples are not ideal for setting up original typologies because legitimate types may be absent or repre- sented by only single specimens. However, the author has avoided many of the other pitfalls which accompany such procedures, and I doubt whether anyone in her position could have done better. Before this system is applied elsewhere, however, it should be seen for what it is - a typology designed around Janette Deacon's exposure to southern Cape assemblages where LSA tool morphology is a good deal less formalized than elsewhere in the interior of South Africa, and where the best available artefact samples are relatively poor in finished tools. I see no merit at all in exporting it in unmodified form to other regions of southemn Africa.

Less intrepid readers will no doubt skip to the end of Chapter 5 where the analytical threads are gathered together. The three sites all yield more formal tools after 7000 -6000 B.P. (Wilton). All these types occur also in the late Pleistocene deposits, but in smaller numbers and with greater metric variations (Robberg). Between

12 000 and 8000 B.P. all these sites yield a smaller range of tool types, with bigger flakes and scrapers, and with more rock types suited to the production of larger flake blanks (Albany/Oakhurst). Bone points, ostrich eggshell beads and coastal shell ornaments occur throughout the sequence, but potsherds appear only at the top of the stack (herder). Abrupt changes in a wide variety of metric and other attributes are in harmony with one another, with only a few discre- pancies between sites, all of which are quite easily explained. The precise timing of some of these changes cannot be fixed, however, for want of enough radiocarbon dates immediately above, below and at the crucial interfaces. Some very interesting samples of apparently intermediate composition like, for instance, the BRL 7 between the Robberg and Albany/Oakhurst at Boomplaas and the BSL in the equivalent position at Nelson Bay Cave are not discussed further. It would be good to know whether the author considers the possibility of a depositional hiatus at these crucial times - a critical question when it comes to explaining the observed changes.

In Chapter 6 these changes are fitted to the environmental shifts previously expounded. Theorists will no doubt want to take issue with the author's enthusiasm for trends in modern technological change (increased complexity, standardization, miniaturization) as the basis for a new paradigm. This of course opens wide the famous trap of false analogy and differs in no way from an exercise which would compare the southern Cape LSA with the ethnological record of, say, the Andaman Islanders. The concepts of innovational and post-innovational change borrowed from the historians of technologi- cal diffusion may have more lasting merit, but the enormous com- plexity of this subject explored in the later work of Homer Barnett is not really touched upon.

When the trend-lines are fitted together, it emerges that the 12 000 B.P. shift in technology lags behind the post-glacial change in vegetation of 14 000 B.P. in the same manner as the large grazers in the macro-mammal record of Boomplaas. At this point I must confess to becoming confused over the author's interpretation. While she argues that climatic change has not influenced technology imme- diately (p. 291), it has however triggered "4sociocultural adjust- ments". These in turn are reflected in stylistic changes (my italics). I read this to mean that stylistic changes should have been triggered at 14 000 B.P., but the field evidence clearly fails to support this. The subsequent shift to standardization/miniaturization (microliths) after 7000 B.P. and to ceramics after 2000 B.P. are seen as diffusion by- products, not obviously keyed to an environmental change. While the latter is well documented and less contentious, data in support of the former remain rather skimpy, but it is gratifying to see the author embrace this model (p. 280) after having earlier (p. 11-12) excoriated my 15-year old version (Sampson 1974:321) of it as (in Binfordese) "a post hoc accommodative argument".

There follows in Chapter 7 a superb synthesis of the southern African LSA sequence, but always of course avoiding any of the existing labels for its various parts - these being relegated to a list of equivalents in Table 69. Thus we have in their place the "late Pleistocene microlithic assemblages" followed by "terminal Pleisto- cene/early Holocene non-microlithic assemblages", then "Holocene microlithic assemblages" and finally "late Holocene assemblages associated with pottery". Clearly, conservatism leads to long titles, and the literature, already groaning with synonyms, has acquired yet another layering of terminology for the same material. Semantic quibbling aside, the synthesis itself is a tour de force covering dating, subsistence, ethnobotany, plant remains, seasonal mobility and (for the ceramic assemblages) pastoralist ethnohistory. There is nothing in the literature at present so comprehensive or so detailed.

In the conclusions it is finally conceded (p. 366) that the tripartite subdivision of the sequence into Robberg, Albany/Oakhurst and Wilton industries has some merit and it is proposed that the analysis has supported the notion of "punctuated equilibria". This is said to be the chief characteristic of diachronic change in the southern Cape LSA sequence. Again, it is at this point in the discussion that I missed any mention of the real possibility that there were abandonment episodes between the "equilibria". Such a possibility raises the pros- pect that "sudden" changes observed here were caused by longer and more gradual changes somewhere else. Until more precise dating of the interfaces between equilibria is achieved, we will make no headway in dealing with this rival hypothesis. It cannot be simply

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58 The South African Archaeological Bulletin

ignored, however; nor can the possibility of population movements be so lightly dismissed.

Such professional cavilling as appears in this review cannot possibly detract from the value of this monograph, however. It will quickly take its place alongside that small body of works which stand as landmarks in the development of South African prehistoric research. Janette Deacon has given us an outstanding synthesis and has considerably advanced the standards of lithic analysis.

References BISHOP, W. W. & CLARK, J. D. eds. 1967. Background to

evolution in Africa. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

DEACON, J. 1978. Changing patterns in the late Pleistocene/early Holocene prehistory of southern Africa as seen in the Nelson Bay Cave stone artifact sequence. Quatern. Res. 10:84-111.

SAMPSON, C. G. 1974. The Stone Age archaeology of southern Africa. New York: Academic Press.

VAN RIET LOWE, C. 1929. The Smithfield Industry in the Orange Free State. In Goodwin, A. J. H. & Van Riet Lowe, C. The Stone Age cultures of South Africa. Ann. S. Afr. Mus. 27:151-206.

C. GARTH SAMPSON Southern Methodist University

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