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that there were no different assemblages above or below these Howiesons Poort assemblages

at the type site.

South African-born John Goodwin was a Cambridge-trained archaeologist and, as lecturer in
Ethnology and Archaeology at UCT, was the first professionally employed archaeologist in

southern Africa. When he came to assess the likely sequence of stone-age prehistory for his
collaborative ‘The Stone Age Cultures of South Africa’ he faced substantial difficulties, not

least the issue of the age of assemblages in different places. Stratigraphy will demonstrate that

lower assemblages are older than higher ones in a single column: A is older than B because it
comes from lower down in the sequence. But where assemblages are unconnected

stratigraphically, some other measure is needed. Like all archaeologists of the time, he relied
on typology, the supposed replacement of one type tool by another, and the evolutionary

assumption that these tools would eventually form a single, rather coherent sequence of
gradual change. Similar assemblages were the same age. To be fair, Goodwin was an

excellent archaeologist who did make a critical early break with this notion. He and van Riet

Lowe chose not to use the European scheme of Lower, Middle and Upper Palaeolithic stages
and preferred to construct the, now classic African, ESA, MSA and LSA framework. This

decision was based on Goodwin’s knowledge that the sequences in the two continents were

not identical, especially in the last 30,000 years or so when they diverged quite drastically.

By 1929 quite a lot of stone tool assemblages had been discovered, collected and stored in
museums across South Africa. Hewitt himself had excavated a series of assemblages from the

Wilton Large Rock Shelter, also not far from his base in Grahamstown, that were rather
microlithic in overall form, ie. small tools made from fine-grained local rocks. These ‘Wilton’

assemblages (continuing the tradition of naming assemblage sets from ‘type sites’) were by

now seen to be definitively Later Stone Age, both stratigraphically shown and typologically
thought to postdate the larger flake tools of the Middle Stone Age. The Early Stone Age

assemblages, characterised by even larger hand axes, were reliably regarded as even earlier
than the MSA. They were turning up in different kinds of places, often along river terraces.

This reliance on type tools, type sites and type assemblages was comforting when viewed
against stratigraphic sequences but could lead to chronological constructs that later become

unworkable. This is what happened in the case of the Howiesons Poort.