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A Critical Review of the Stratigraphic Context of the MSA I and II at Klasies River Main Site, South Africa

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Abstract

Klasies River Main site, on South Africa’s southern Cape coast, has contributed significantly to understanding Late Pleistocene human evolution. Excavations across this complex of caves and rock shelters have uncovered important assemblages of human fossils, faunal remains and lithic artefacts which have allowed interpretations of human anatomy and behaviour, and the palaeoenvironmental context of human occupations. The stratigraphy of the site is complicated, and the deposits have been recorded and published at varying degrees of resolution and detail over three phases of fieldwork. This paper is the first detailed review of the stratigraphy of any part of the sequence, and considers the different stratigraphic approaches used at Klasies and the published data and interpretations for the basal deposits. These units have been assigned to the Light Brown Sand, Rubble Brown Sand and Shell and Sand Members, and have yielded MSA I and MSA II lithic assemblages and most of the human fossils. We argue that some of the published stratigraphic interpretations need to be reconsidered, that a purely lithostratigraphic approach to the deposits at Klasies is not currently viable and that further field description and micromorphological work is needed. More broadly, this review demonstrates potential complications for stratigraphic correlation during the reinvestigation of previously excavated sites. These include the importance of understanding site formation processes in a lithostratigraphic system, and the need to think about how, why and at what resolution we make correlations between different stratigraphic systems or different areas within a site or site complex.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge the use of photographs taken by Kathryn Croll and profile drawings made by the late Hilary Deacon and colleagues and redrawn digitally by Liezl van Pletzen Vos. We also thank the reviewers and editors for comments which have improved the quality of this paper.

Funding

This research was made possible by funding from the DSI-NRF Centre of Excellence in Palaeosciences.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

    Peter Morrissey & Sarah Wurz

  2. Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment, Institute for Archaeological Sciences, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany

    Susan M. Mentzer

  3. SFF Centre for Early Sapiens Behaviour (SapienCE), University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

    Sarah Wurz

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Morrissey, P., Mentzer, S.M. & Wurz, S. A Critical Review of the Stratigraphic Context of the MSA I and II at Klasies River Main Site, South Africa. J Paleo Arch 5, 5 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41982-022-00110-2

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