Page 90 - Bulletin 15 2011
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Terminological Framework
Pleistocene, Holocene, ESA, MSA, LSA.
The last 2.5 million years or so are known as the Pleistocene, a period that corresponds
approximately with the evolution of technically modern people. It also experienced a
long series of glacial/interglacial climate cycles – the so-called ice ages. For the later
part of the Pleistocene, about the last 800,000 years or so, these cycles have each
lasted about 100,000 years, with smaller scale oscillations recorded inside the larger
changes. Caused by irregularities in the earth’s tilt and orbit, the most notable changes
were dramatic expansions and contractions of the ice caps at both poles, resultant
dropping and rising of global sea levels, and significant alterations in both atmospheric
and oceanic circulation patterns. The period since the retreat of the 'last' glacial
advance, the last 12,000 years or so, is conventionally known as the Holocene or
Recent.
The earliest known stone tools come from Africa and date to the beginning of the
Pleistocene period, about 2.6 million years ago, although we are fairly certain that
earlier people were using stone for tools and probably making rough tools that we are
not able to recognise. For the 2.6 million years of changing stone tools we need a
standard terminology. In Europe archaeologists speak of a Lower, Middle and Upper
Palaeolithic sequence, but John Goodwin and Peter van Riet Lowe developed a
different set of terms, Early, Middle and Later Stone Ages, to suit the longer and
different African time span. Early Stone Age sites (about 2.5 million years ago to
about 300,000) are characterised, at least after about 1.6 million years ago, by large,
bi-facially flaked hand axes and cleavers; Middle Stone Age assemblages (300,000 to
about 30,000) by smaller flake tools, some of them undoubtedly mounted and hafted
on wooden shafts; and the Later Stone Age (about 30,000 to present) by even smaller,
sometimes ‘microlithic’, sometimes geometrically shaped, artefacts that must have
been simply the stone working edges of composite tools.
