May 31st, 2018
MosselBaai, South Africa
It is strange to be back in South Africa, after quite an
eventful year. This will be my first time participating in the project as a
graduate student, a fact which is exciting and a bit intimidating. Mostly, I’m
looking forward to taking a break from reading papers, debating papers,
thinking about papers, and writing papers about said papers. (Just kidding.
Grad students don’t really take breaks, and I have a thesis to write). However,
I am enjoying my time in the lab and upcoming time onsite. It’s a nice change
of pace.
Our lab is located in Mosselbaai, a small town on the Garden
Route of South Africa. The town is stacked on the hilly terrain of a peninsula, surrounded
by endless sea and sky and framed by hazy mountains sketched into the eastern
horizon. Like every South African town I’ve stayed in, the shops and stores
close early every night and earlier on Sunday. The bay hosts a port, and the
heavy drilling ships can occasionally be seen, pausing on their mission to
upkeep the immobile rigs. Seals and sharks are generally at home in the bay,
and shark diving is a featured activity, which I have been strenuously avoiding
despite helpful suggestions.
During the “winter” months of June, July and August, the
town becomes a shade of its former self, the visitors leaving for warmer
climes. Into this vacancy the archaeologists come. Mosselbaai is situated near
the Middle Stone Age sites of Pinnacle Point, which are argued to be the
earliest evidence for intense and repeated use of marine resources (around
160,000 years ago). These sites were excavated almost continuously for around
fifteen years, which led the establishment of a lab for year-round processing
and analysis of the archaeological material. Which it is tempting to portray
archaeologists as always in some trench or other, digging away, in truth I have
spent far more time in the lab during my brief career.
Our lab is situated in a set of historical houses kept by
the Diaz museum. It’s a busy place, continually staffed by local
archaeologists. The walls are covered with posters and diagrams, a display case
in the front room for unsuspecting tourists. A tall stone walkway frames the
front of the house, overlooking the beach and the pristine bay.
Generally, there is another field season running during this
time, causing the lab to be empty of people but full of odds and ends,
equipment and stacks of food. Right now, no one is in the field yet, and the
lab is in full swing. Several of my colleagues are sorting sieved material, to get
all the smallest fragments of shell, lithic, bone, ect., that were missed
onside and send them to specialists. Another researcher is analyzing lithics
from the aforementioned Pinnacle Point. I am looking at the bones from Knysna,
a site which is much younger (~46,000-19,000) and situated during a fascinating
time: when the ocean is rapidly shifting due to an interglacial-glacial period,
and a change in human technology.
My job is simply to identify the bones, both the type of
bone and the animal it belongs to, as well as any marks, including those from
stone tools and animals. Okay, not the simplest job in the world, given the
amount of training and experience required, but it is fun. I’ve been a part of
all the prior work required to get to this stage—excavation, sorting, and
washing—so it’s great to sit down and look at them with a research question in
mind. 
Our lab has a great comparative collection, dozens and
dozens of animals collected from around South Africa of numerous species and
genera. If I am unable to narrow down the potential animal from the bone (a
problem if the bones are highly fragmented), then I look at the thickness of
bone to try and determine the size of the animal. I also use the comparative collection
to determine the potential bone, or type of bone—cranial, long bone, ect—for
tiny fragments which are impossible to name. I take measurements for both length
and width, to see if the size of the fragments varies across time. This can
give us an idea of how the site was being used. Additionally, I look for any type
of marks. There are several which are obvious—cutmarks, usually a result of
defleshing; percussion, from taking a rock and smashing open the long bones for
the juicy marrow; and tooth marks, which naturally result from predatory,
non-human teeth. Tracing the marks can lead to the identity of the accumulator
(human vs. non-humans), if there was more than one predator involved, and what
order they acquired the bones. 
Taphonomy (processes altering remains after death) can also
throw a wrench into analysis. So, I look at the ends of bones to try and
determine if they smashed open or broken during the thousands of years in the
ground (sharp, pointed ends = smashing, flat ends = pressure from the soil). Bones
might be trampled, pitted, generally degraded, and possibly fused to other
artifacts. Untangling what happened might be the ultimate detective mystery
(for me, anyway).
Why do it? Fauna from other South African sites have aided
paleo-environmental reconstructions, provided examples of symbolism and
technology, suggested ranges of mobility, and offered insight into human subsistence
practices. Plus, it can satisfy our curiosity of the unknown—and of people all but lost in the expanse of time.
All of this will be wrapped up in my thesis, coming spring
2019. Hopefully I can answer to some of these questions.
When I’m not engaged in thesis, I spend a lot of time wandering
Mosselbaai. Occasionally I run across various animals, some of which are those we
have found at Knysna. I’m always curious—did the ancients look at the animals
around them and see cute and fuzzy, or just protein? I’m mostly asking in
reference to the cats. Those dassies can be aggressive.
Tomorrow Dr. C and company arrive, and the fun begins. See you in Knysna!
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| Procavia capensis (dassie) in natural habitat |
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| Dassies at rest, until next feeding |
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| fish in the Bay |
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| Foraging |
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| wild domestic cats |
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| Taking a break |
