Browsing by Author "Henderson, Zoe"

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    New radiocarbon dates for Matjes River Rock Shelter
    (South African Archaeological Society, 2006) Sealy, Judith; Ludwig, Ben; Henderson, Zoe
    Matjes River Rock Shelter is a key site for the Later Stone Age in South Africa. Early excavations were, however, crude, and we have only a very broad picture of the sequence uncovered by Dreyer (1933) and Hoffman and Meiring (Hoffman 1958, 1962; Louw 1960). More detailed work by Hilary Deacon and Willemien Dockel in the early 1990s provided better resolution on the lower part of the sequence, but in the areas in which they worked, the upper layers were unfortunately no longer preserved (Dockel 1998). Nearly all the previously published radiocarbon dates for Matjes River are for the lower levels.We present here a series of recent radiocarbon determinations, most of them for materials derived from the upper levels. Some of these results have been published (Sealy and Pfeiffer 2000), but many are new. Here, we explore the implications of the suite of dates for the sequence at the site.