TY - JOUR
T1 - Explaining the 'Klasies Pattern'
T2 - Kua ethnoarchaeology, the Die Kelders Middle Stone Age archaeofauna, long bone fragmentation and carnivore ravaging
AU - Bartram, Laurence E.
AU - Marean, Curtis W.
N1 - Funding Information:
Bartram would like to thank the OYce of the President, Republic of Botswana, for permission to conduct fieldwork in Central District, and the Kua for their tolerance and friendship. Thanks are due to Debswana Mining Pty. Ltd., for provided unflagging logistical help, and especially to Keith and Irene Whitelock. Henry Bunn, Ellen Kroll, Lisanne Bartram, Kgatiso Gabatswane, Christian Gurney, Marty Jakobs and Keikantsemang ‘‘Shakes’’ Tshikhinya participated in the Kua field research. This paper has also benefited from discussions with Henry Bunn, Sandrine Costamagno, Hilary Deacon, Paul Goldberg, Yin Lam, John Parkington and Paola Villa. Franc¸ois Lacrampe-Cuyabere skillfully drew the illustrations for Figure 8. Financial support for Bartram’s work with the Kua was provided by a National Science Foundation graduate research grant and an Institute for International Education Fulbright Program Grant to him, and by a National Science Foundation Grant to Henry Bunn and Ellen Kroll. Marean thanks Yin Lam and Neal Walters for their help on the Die Kelders collection and Dr Graham Avery and the rest of the staV in archaeology at the South African Museum. The Die Kelders project is funded by NSF Grant BNS 91–20117 to Frederick Grine, Richard G. Klein and Curtis W. Marean, and the Die Kelders faunal analysis by NSF grant BNS 97-27491 to Marean.
PY - 1999/1
Y1 - 1999/1
N2 - The caves at Klasies River Mouth (KRM) in the southern Cape Province, South Africa, continue to play an important role in the study of human evolution and debates about the origins of 'modern' humans. As with most Palaeolithic sites, the behavioural interpretations offered for the Middle Stone Age (MSA) inhabitants of the KRM caves are based in large part on the interpretation of fragmentary faunal remains from the 'Main Site', or caves 1, 1A, 1B and 2 excavated in 1967-68 by Singer and Wymer (1982). Using zooarchaeological patterns detected in ethnoarchaeological data collected among Kua foragers of the eastern Kalahari, Central District, Botswana, as well as in data collected from Die Kelders Cave 1, Layer 10, South Africa, we offer an alternative explanation for a provocative pattern of skeletal part representation discovered in the KRM MSA archaeofauna over 20 years ago by Richard Klein (1976). The Klasies pattern is characterized by the underrepresentation of large bovid upper limb elements relative to more anatomically complete small bovids. To date, the pattern has been interpreted in three different ways, each with strikingly different implications for Middle Stone Age (MSA)/Middle Palaeolithic (MP) human behaviour. Understanding the nature of the pattern is not only important for reconstructing MSA human behaviour at KRM, but it is also important for understanding how the conduct of zooarchaeological analyses can profoundly influence our reconstructions of the course of human behavioural evolution. The Kua ethnoarchaeological data and experimental case studies unambiguously connect to site formation histories to zooarchaeological patterns. At Die Kelders Cave 1, Layer 10, the ethnoarchaeological expectations are expressed archaeologically in a context analytically relevant to KRM. Overall, by joining the Kua and the Die Kelders data, we show how uniformitarian/actualistic approaches can be productively employed in zooarchaeological interpretation. The 'Klasies Pattern' is likely to be an artefact of a widespread taphonomic sequence, followed by a particular style of analysis employed, for practical reasons, by many zooarchaeologists. We suggest that the situation is common and likely to be seriously distorting inferences about many archaeofaunas around the world. More generally we show how uniformitarian studies offer a coherent framework for developing methods and generating data useful in making behavioural inferences from faunal remains. Rather than a human behavioural signal in the KRM archaeofauna, the Klasies Pattern has more to do with the methods of zooarchaeology than with the behaviour of ancient people.
AB - The caves at Klasies River Mouth (KRM) in the southern Cape Province, South Africa, continue to play an important role in the study of human evolution and debates about the origins of 'modern' humans. As with most Palaeolithic sites, the behavioural interpretations offered for the Middle Stone Age (MSA) inhabitants of the KRM caves are based in large part on the interpretation of fragmentary faunal remains from the 'Main Site', or caves 1, 1A, 1B and 2 excavated in 1967-68 by Singer and Wymer (1982). Using zooarchaeological patterns detected in ethnoarchaeological data collected among Kua foragers of the eastern Kalahari, Central District, Botswana, as well as in data collected from Die Kelders Cave 1, Layer 10, South Africa, we offer an alternative explanation for a provocative pattern of skeletal part representation discovered in the KRM MSA archaeofauna over 20 years ago by Richard Klein (1976). The Klasies pattern is characterized by the underrepresentation of large bovid upper limb elements relative to more anatomically complete small bovids. To date, the pattern has been interpreted in three different ways, each with strikingly different implications for Middle Stone Age (MSA)/Middle Palaeolithic (MP) human behaviour. Understanding the nature of the pattern is not only important for reconstructing MSA human behaviour at KRM, but it is also important for understanding how the conduct of zooarchaeological analyses can profoundly influence our reconstructions of the course of human behavioural evolution. The Kua ethnoarchaeological data and experimental case studies unambiguously connect to site formation histories to zooarchaeological patterns. At Die Kelders Cave 1, Layer 10, the ethnoarchaeological expectations are expressed archaeologically in a context analytically relevant to KRM. Overall, by joining the Kua and the Die Kelders data, we show how uniformitarian/actualistic approaches can be productively employed in zooarchaeological interpretation. The 'Klasies Pattern' is likely to be an artefact of a widespread taphonomic sequence, followed by a particular style of analysis employed, for practical reasons, by many zooarchaeologists. We suggest that the situation is common and likely to be seriously distorting inferences about many archaeofaunas around the world. More generally we show how uniformitarian studies offer a coherent framework for developing methods and generating data useful in making behavioural inferences from faunal remains. Rather than a human behavioural signal in the KRM archaeofauna, the Klasies Pattern has more to do with the methods of zooarchaeology than with the behaviour of ancient people.
KW - Ethnoarchaeology
KW - Faunal analysis
KW - Klasies river mouth
KW - Middle palaeolithic
KW - Middle stone age
KW - Taphonomy
KW - Zooarchaeology
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U2 - 10.1006/jasc.1998.0291
DO - 10.1006/jasc.1998.0291
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:0033016442
SN - 0305-4403
VL - 26
SP - 9
EP - 29
JO - Journal of Archaeological Science
JF - Journal of Archaeological Science
IS - 1
ER -