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The Scraper Planes from Leopard Cave, Erongo Mountains, Namibia

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Abstract

Leopard Cave, Erongo Mountains, Namibia, delivered an important quantity of macrotools, mainly in local basalt, through a Later Stone Age sequence spanning mainly the Later Holocene. These tools, usually labelled ‘crude’ or ‘archaic’, raise questions on the specialised technical activities which occurred at the site. Through a technological methodology combining chaîne opératoire (operational chains) and techno-functional approaches, we argue that these tools represent a consistent specialised technological category despite a high productional diversity. We describe a large panel of chaînes opératoires used to produce one specific tool type which displays all the volumetric patterns of a plane and implies a specific human gesture and force application. Indeed, we argue that the apparent lithic technological variability reflects an important affordance in the production of a unique tool type which suggests the existence of specialised technical behaviours at Leopard Cave.

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Acknowledgements

We are particularly grateful to Aurore Val for her invitation to contribute to this special issue. We are grateful to the team of the National Museum of Namibia for the collection access facilities and to the Musée des arts et métiers traditionnels de Salles la Source in France for allowing the use of their record. We are grateful to all the excavation teams and to the owners of the farm. We thank the French Institute of South Africa – Research for supporting the publication of this paper. We are grateful to Ben Collins, Viola Schmid, and anonymous reviewer for their relevant reading and valuable comments of the manuscript. We thank the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs for their support and the Prehistropic project funded by the Ville de Paris (Emergences programme).

Funding

This study was funded by the Fyssen Foundation, France/Ministère de l’Europe et des Affaires Etrangères, France/Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle/Prehistropic Project — Ville de Paris — Programme Emergences.

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  1. UMR7194 – Histoire Naturelle de l’Homme Préhistorique MNHN/CNRS/UPVD, Institut de Paléontologie Humaine, 1 Rue René Panhard, 75013, Paris, France

    Isis Isabella Mesfin & David Pleurdeau

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  1. Isis Isabella Mesfin
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I.M. and D.P. wrote the main manuscript text and D.P. prepared figures 1 to 4 and I.M. prepared the figures 5 to 14. All authors reviewed the manuscript.

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Correspondence to David Pleurdeau.

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Mesfin, I.I., Pleurdeau, D. The Scraper Planes from Leopard Cave, Erongo Mountains, Namibia. J Paleo Arch 6, 37 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41982-023-00162-y

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