The Animal Factor

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!

Procavia capensis (dassie) in natural habitat

Dassies at rest, until next feeding

fish in the Bay

Foraging

wild domestic cats

Taking a break