Bedtime for the Middle Stone Age: land use, strategic foraging, and lithic technology at the end of the Pleistocene in the Namib Desert, Namibia

From archaeological data, we know that throughout most of the past 200,000 years in Africa, anatomically modern humans lived as hunter-gatherers and depended on surprisingly simple forms of flaked stone tools for their technological needs. During isolated periods, however, certain groups rapidly shifted to more elaborate stone implements before eventually reverting back to simpler forms. Explaining this “seesaw” pattern has recently been a major challenge for archaeologists. Contemporary models have focused on foraging strategies and climatic changes that affected the distribution of food and water resources, altering the demands on subsistence technologies and driving change. This project evaluates the hypothesis that shifts that occurred 10-20,000 years ago between “Middle Stone Age” to “Late Stone Age” tool technologies at two sites in the central Namib desert of Namibia were responses to changes in the patterns of river flow in the desert environment. Using data from excavations and a survey of the locations where people acquired stone to make tools, my research suggests people during early occupation phases of the sites focused their foraging into zones of the landscape around rivers and the inland highlands of modern-day Namibia, with technological systems adapted to these environments. In contrast, later groups faced more challenging conditions and shifted toward more dispersed patterns of land use centered into drier, riskier environmental zones. While my work supports the notion that technological shifts were partially responses to environmental change, the data also point to other factors underlying technological changes that archaeologists have largely been unable to examine.