Abstract
Olorgesailie is a sedimentary basin in the southern Kenya Rift Valley. Its sediments preserve one of the longest sequences of Acheulean archaeological sites in Africa. Acheulean artifact sites are currently known in at least 29 stratigraphic layers through the Olorgesailie Fm, dated by single-crystal 40Ar /39Ar technique between 1.2 million and 499,000 years old. Work by Glynn Isaac in the 1960s was largely devoted to Acheulean large-cutting-tool (LCT) morphology and high-density artifact assemblages. Since 1985 research has focused on paleolandscape-scale excavations of high- and low-density assemblages of artifacts, faunal remains, and associated paleoecological indicators across the basin. This expanded spatial window has led to mapping the highland volcanic rock sources in the region and stronger attention to the flakes and smaller flaked pieces that often dominate Acheulean assemblages. These non-LCT components have drawn attention to episodic variations beginning c. 615 ka in stone flaking, long-distance curation, and lighter toolkits, which eventually became defining characteristics of the early Middle Stone Age (MSA) at Olorgesailie by c. 320 ka. Acheulean excavations have uncovered single- and multiple-animal butchery sites, concentrations of artifacts with diverse animal remains, and plant-food processing sites. Acheulean LCTs associated with numerous Theropithecus monkey fossil bones occur in shallow paleo-stream channels dated c. 900 ka, but these sites lack definitive evidence of hunting or even butchery. The detailed archive of environmental dynamics recorded at Olorgesailie over the past 1 million years, along with massive turnover in the mammalian fauna coinciding with the region’s Acheulean-to-MSA transition, inspired the variability selection hypothesis. This idea has led paleoanthropologists and geologists to focus more intently on how ecological dynamics may have favored adaptive flexibility and the evolution of novel hominin and faunal adaptations.
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Acknowledgments
I acknowledge with gratitude the long-term collaboration with the National Museums of Kenya, and thank M. Kibunjia and F.K. Manthi for their support, and J.M Nume and J.N. Mativo for their skillful leadership of the Kenya field team at Olorgesailie since 1985. A.K. Behrensmeyer and A.L. Deino, among other colleagues, have played vital roles in understanding the geology and geochronology of the southern Kenya Rift. J.B. Clark handled logistics and field operations and assisted with the figures of this chapter. The Olorgesailie project has been supported by the Peter Buck Fund for Human Origins Research and the Human Origins Program of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.
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Potts, R. (2023). Acheulean of the Olorgesailie Basin, Kenya. In: Beyin, A., Wright, D.K., Wilkins, J., Olszewski, D.I. (eds) Handbook of Pleistocene Archaeology of Africa . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20290-2_41
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