Elsevier

Quaternary International

Volumes 611–612, 20 February 2022, Pages 134-145
Quaternary International

The technology and ecology of Lesotho's highland hunter-gatherers: A case study at Sehonghong rock shelter

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2020.10.019Get rights and content

Abstract

Here we evaluate the hypothesis that during cold climatic phases, people and resources became increasingly packed along highland Lesotho's riverine corridors as the viability of palatable grasslands for large mammal hunting on the upland plateaus declined. These intensification efforts resulted in increased reliance on lower-ranked aquatic (fish) resources with knock-on effects for lithic technological organization. We compare data on the relative contribution of fishing to the diets of highland hunter-gatherers at Sehonghong rockshelter with a faunal proxy widely argued to correlate with subsistence intensification (faunal assemblage evenness). In addition, we compare these data with two measures of lithic technological intensification (cutting edge production and core reduction intensity) to test whether diet intensification tracks technological intensification. We show that at Sehonghong, aquatic resource exploitation is not always correlated with faunal assemblage evenness. We find that some layers (i.e. RF) show spikes in aquatic resource use irrespective of changes in faunal assemblage evenness. Other layers (i.e. RBL/CLBRF) were intensively occupied, but they do not have many fish. Our data also demonstrate that aquatic resource use is not correlated with lithic technological intensification. These results suggest that while aquatic resource exploitation was a ‘fallback’ option for some of Lesotho's highland hunter-gatherers, there is considerable variability. Our data show that multiple intensification dimensions were variably combined through the Late Pleistocene at Sehonghong as they were elsewhere in southern Africa.

Introduction

The volatile Late Pleistocene (~125–12 ka) climate had variable but dramatic effects on local environments that human foraging societies depended on. Patterning in climate and its effects on resource availability are among the critical influences on hunter-gatherer behavioral variability (Kelly, 2013). The second half of the Late Pleistocene sees significant human behavioral variability under conditions of marked environmental and ecological change (Soffer and Gamble, 1990; Barton et al., 2007). Archeologists have long argued that this period witnessed changes in social and technological organization to cope with subsistence intensification analogous to processes seen in recent hunter-gatherers (e.g., Binford, 2001). Yet, few African regions contain robust records of human occupation from this period to test hypotheses about social and technological change and its relationships to subsistence intensification (see, for example, Mackay et al., 2014; Pleurdeau et al., 2014).

In southern Africa, MIS 3 (~60 - 29 ka) and the early part of MIS 2 (~29-20 ka) witness an important reorganization of lithic technology. Middle Stone Age systems based on blade production and prepared core technology are gradually replaced by Later Stone Age miniaturized flake and blade technologies (Wadley, 1993; Mitchell, 2008). The production of small stone tools is a form of ‘intensification’, an effort to recover more cutting edge from smaller tool materials. Some archeologists have argued that the regularity with which small stone tools appear from Later Pleistocene times onward reflects increasing human population densities and smaller foraging ranges or territory sizes (Marean, 2016; Tryon and Faith, 2016). Such contexts may have provided selective pressures for toolmakers to invest more energy in tool production to continue reaping sufficient energetic returns from resource patches (cf. Herzog and Goodale, 2019). Alternatively, miniaturized technologies may have been adaptations to life in already marginal or unpredictable foraging patches (Mackay and Marwick, 2011).

Here we test if the subsistence intensification observed at Sehonghong is related to global cooling phases as suggested by Stewart and Mitchell (2018a: 179, 189). In addition, and outside of the scope of Stewart & Mitchell's initial hypothesis, we test whether these relationships co-occur with intensification in the site's lithic technologies. Stewart and Mitchell (2018a) propose that decreased ungulate carrying capacity during cold climatic phases (Last Glacial Maximum [LGM: 23–19 ka] and Antarctic Cold Reversal [ACR: 14.5–13 ka]) drove demographic, land use, and lithic reorganization with effects seen in Sehonghong's aquatic resource intensification. To test Stewart & Mitchell's main hypothesis, we compare their fish:mammal ratio to a measure of faunal assemblage evenness, which some archaeologists argue correlates with subsistence intensification. We then compare these dietary measures with two measures of lithic technological intensification (cutting edge production and core reduction intensity) to test whether dietary intensification tracks technological intensification.

Section snippets

The selective pressures on Lesotho's highland hunter-gatherers

Eastern Lesotho is one of southern Africa's most climatically extreme regions (Bawden and Carroll, 1968). Stewart et al. (2012, 2016, 2018a) develop a push-pull population model to explain the shifting occupation patterns of this climatically and topographically extreme area. They propose that during climatically unstable and arid periods, Lesotho's mountains functioned as a refugium for groups from lower-lying regions. Their model suggests that under stadial conditions, hunter-gatherers used

Fauna

Previous work suggests several ways in which intensification should lead to changes in faunal assemblage composition. From this work, we derive a “taxon-free” measure (cf. Faith and Lyman, 2019) for the fauna data published by Plug and Mitchell (2008a, 2008b), to test if hunter-gatherer mammalian predation patterns correlate with intensified aquatic resource use (see also Clark and Kandel, 2013; Dusseldorp, 2014).

To test the prediction that under conditions of decreased terrestrial

Results

Fig. 6 presents the chert abundance and quality data from the raw material survey squares. The data show an abundance of cherts in the squares with the terrestrial sample showing significantly greater chert abundances than the riverine sample (x2 [1] = 9.5, p < 0.01, Cramer's V effect size = 0.22). Data on the chert qualities show significantly higher frequencies of fine cherts compared to coarse or heterogenous cherts (x2 [1] = 21, p < 0.01, Cramer's V effect size = 0.27). Fine-grained cherts

Discussion

Our results demonstrate that the relationship between global climates, the (re)organization of lithic technology, and indications for subsistence intensification at Sehonghong are not straightforward. Global climatic cooling may have severely impacted highland Lesotho's local environment, but human behavioral responses appear to have been complex and variable.

Stewart and Mitchell (2018a) propose a mechanism to explain how specific global climate change affected local paleoenvironmental

Conclusions

This study contributes to a growing body of research on the ecology and technological adaptations of Lesotho's highland hunter-gatherer groups. Here we test the hypothesis that climate change intensified these groups' diet and landscape use strategies. Our results provide mixed support for Stewart and Mitchell's (2018a) model arguing that aquatic resource intensification was linked with the broadening of hunter-gatherer diets. We find several instances in which fishing intensified irrespective

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Peter Mitchell for generously providing access to the Sehonghong lithic assemblage and to the University of Cape Town for facilitating the data capture. Justin Pargeter's work was supported by the National Science Foundation [grant number 1542310, 2015]; the Leakey Foundation; and the Dan David Foundation. Gerrit Dusseldorp is supported through Dutch Research Council (NWO) Vidi grant 276-60-004. We dedicate this paper to all the service workers and people on the frontlines of

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