Elands Bay Day
The Stone Age of Elands Bay Cave in Perspective
Workshop
1 December 2017
09.00 – 16.00 – 17.00 – IFAS Conference Room, 62 Juta Street, Braamfontein
Organised by Guillaume Porraz (CNRS / AnTET) & John E. Parkington (UCT)
Elands Bay Cave, located on the Atlantic Coast north of Cape Town, is one of the key sites for the study of the Southern African Middle Age and Later Stone Age. Firstly excavated in the 1960s, the site has been re-opened in 2011 with field activities that focused on Pleistocene deposits documenting occupations from the early MSA and from the final MSA to the Robberg. The site relates to the research area of the Verlorenvlei catchment, rich in its environmental and cultural record providing the opportunity to build local scenarios of human evolution. Based on those research, a monography on the site was recently published as a special issue of Southern African Humanities. The volume edited by John Parkington and Guillaume Porraz comprises 10 original papers (geology, chronology, technology, subsistence, environments) that address questions of continuities and discontinuities at different geographic and temporal scales. The conference day provides an opportunity to confront alternative and complementary information fueling the discussion on how Anatomically Modern Humans adapted and transformed over the last 200,000 years.
This workshop is part of a collaboration between IFAS-Research, PAST (Wits University) and University of Cape Town.