Page 107 - KBHA Bulletin 15

104

Howiesons Poort assemblages, then, made on narrow flakes called blades, using carefully

selected fine-grained raw materials, especially silcrete, and characterised by backed crescents
similar to those of the later Wilton, became the quintessential second intermediate evidence.

They were demonstrable proof of the long- term evolutionary drift in artefact types toward the
LSA, itself by now inextricably associated with ethnographically and historically known

‘Bushmen’. Some of the very earliest, and now known to be unreliable, radiocarbon dates
were obtained from South African MSA assemblages in the 1950s. These appeared to suggest

that the MSA lasted until about 15,000 years ago, making it possible to think of the

Howiesons Poort as terminal Pleistocene in age. At this time there were no absolute dates for
any Howiesons Poort assemblages, but an influential monograph by Desmond Clark, ‘The

Prehistory of Southern Africa’ (1959), offered the estimate that they might be about 10,000
years old.

By the late 1960s there were widespread concerns about the reliability of the details, but

perhaps not the gross structure, of the stone age terminology of Africa. With the growth in the

accuracy and precision of radiocarbon dates, it became possible to envisage an absolute
chronology rather than one based on the twin typology and stratigraphy model. Radiocarbon

dates could, in effect, test the idea that stone tool types evolve slowly and coherently through

time, rather than assume it. It was also clear that assemblage descriptions and comparisons
should be based on all the artefacts, cores and flake products included, rather than just on

selected, presumed typical pieces. Excavation techniques had also, obviously, progressed
substantially since the 1920s and included greater interests in the shells and bones that

accompanied the stone tools.

In this context, the excavations of John Wymer and Ronald Singer in the late 1960s at a set of

caves near the mouth of the Klasies River near Humansdorp in the southern Cape, were
critical to the future of thinking about the Howiesons Poort assemblages. They made

extensive excavations through a large 20 metre pile of mostly shelly debris that had
accumulated in front of the caves, and described a sequence of MSA assemblages with

associations of well preserved bones and neat fireplaces. (Singer and Wymer, 1982). There
were a number of extremely interesting and important surprises. First, the Howiesons Poort

assemblages were clearly stratified underneath ‘normal’ MSA assemblages and therefore

could not be seen as a post-MSA phenomenon in the process of transforming into the LSA.