Browsing by Author "Mackay, Alex"

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    New excavations at Klein Kliphuis rock shelter, Cederberg Mountains, Western Cape, South Africa: the Late Holocene deposits
    (2008) Orton, Jayson; Mackay, Alex
    Klein Kliphuis (KKH), a rock shelter located in the northern Cederberg Mountains of the Western Cape province, South Africa (Fig. 1), was originally excavated in 1984 with emphasis on the late Holocene Later Stone Age (LSA) layer in the top 200 mm of the deposit (Van Rijssen 1992). At that time only one square was excavated to bedrock, which was reached at about 890 mm. The approximately 700 mm of deposit underlying the Holocene LSA were excavated in four layers. Recent examination of this material showed a complex sequence of Middle Stone Age (MSA) artefact-making traditions (Mackay 2006).
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    Soutfontein (SFT)-001: Preliminary report on an open-air site rich in bifacial points southern Namaqualand South Africa
    (2010) Mackay, Alex; Orton, Jayson; Schwortz, Steve; Steele, Teresa E
    This paper presents the preliminary results of an analysis of bifacially-worked artefacts from Soutfontein (SFT)-OOl, an open site in the Knersvlakte region of southern Namaqualand, South Africa. For over a century, finely- worked bifacial points have been known to occur throughout southern Africa (e.g. Lubbock 1869; Johnson 1907a,b). Such artefacts were first recognized in open-air contexts around Cape Town and in dune field sites such as Kleinjongensfontein and Biombos Sands (Minichillo 2005), and were subsequently noted in shelter sites from Namibia to Zimbabwe and from the Cape to KwaZulu-Natal (Peers 1927, 1929; Armstrong 1931; Jones 1949; Malan 1955; Wendt 1976; Kaplan 1990; Evans 1994; Vogelsang 1998). In recent history the focus of attention has been strongly directed towards assemblages of bifacial points recovered from stratified shelter contexts (e.g. Henshilwood et al. 2001; Rigaud et al. 2006; Jacobs et al. 2008; Wadley 2007; Villa et al 2009). This focus has largely resulted from the need to resolve outstanding issues concerning the relative position of bifacial point-bearing assemblages in southern Africa's cultural stratigraphy and more recently to provide Chronometrie ages for their occurrence. The results of this researchave been highly rewarding, with bifacial point-bearing assemblages having been dated to various periods in Marine Isotope Stages (MIS) 5, 4, and 3 (Villa et al. 2005; Beaumont & Vogel 2006; Jacobs et al. 2008; Tribolo et al. 2009). While the production of bifacial points appears to peak in association with the Still Bay industry in which they are the dominant implement form, such artefacts are not restricted to that industry and occur both earlier and later.
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    Why was silcrete heat-treated in the Middle Stone Age? An early transformative technology in the context of raw material use at Mertenhof Rock Shelter, South Africa
    (Public Library of Science, 2016) Schmidt, Patrick; Mackay, Alex
    People heat treated silcrete during the Middle Stone Age (MSA) in southern Africa but the spatial and temporal variability of this practice remains poorly documented. This paucity of data in turn makes it difficult to interrogate the motive factors underlying the application of this technique. In this paper we present data on heat treatment of silcrete through the Howiesons Poort and post-Howiesons Poort of the rock shelter site Mertenhof, located in the Western Cape of South Africa. In contrast to other sites where heat treatment has been documented, distance to rock source at Mertenhof can be reasonably well estimated, and the site is known to contain high proportions of a diversity of fine grained rocks including silcrete, hornfels and chert at various points through the sequence. Our results suggest the prevalence of heat treatment is variable through the sequence but that it is largely unaffected by the relative abundance of silcrete prevalence. Instead there is a strong inverse correlation between frequency of heat treatment in silcrete and prevalence of chert in the assemblage, and a generally positive correlation with the proportion of locally available rock. While it is difficult to separate individual factors we suggest that, at Mertenhof at least, heat treatment may have been used to improve the fracture properties of silcrete at times when other finer grained rocks were less readily available. As such, heat treatment appears to have been a component of the MSA behavioural repertoire that was flexibly deployed in ways sensitive to other elements of technological organisation.