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Primordialism and the ‘Pleistocene San’ of southern Africa

Justin Pargeter, Alex MacKay, Peter Mitchell, John Shea and Brian A. Stewart

Antiquity / Volume 90 / Issue 352 / August 2016, pp 1072 - 1079DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2016.100, Published online: 19 July 2016

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0003598X16001009

How to cite this article:Justin Pargeter, Alex MacKay, Peter Mitchell, John Shea and Brian A. Stewart (2016).Primordialism and the ‘Pleistocene San’ of southern Africa. Antiquity, 90, pp 1072-1079doi:10.15184/aqy.2016.100

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Analogies are an important tool of archaeological reasoning. The Kalahari San are frequentlydepicted in introductory texts as archetypal, mobile hunter-gatherers, and they have influencedapproaches to archaeological, genetic and linguistic research. But is this analogy fundamentallyflawed? Recent arguments have linked the San populations of southern Africa with the latePleistocene Later Stone Age (c. 44 kya) at Border Cave, South Africa. The authors arguethat these and other claims for the Pleistocene antiquity of modern-day cultures arise from afundamental misunderstanding of the nature of cultural and archaeological taxonomies, andthat they are a misuse of analogical reasoning.

Primordialism and the ‘Pleistocene San’of southern AfricaJustin Pargeter1,2, Alex MacKay3, Peter Mitchell4,5, John Shea6

& Brian A. Stewart7,8

IntroductionThat living humans have late Pleistocene ancestors is beyond dispute. All humans alivetoday descend from people who lived in Africa between 100 000 and 200 000 years ago(Stringer 2012). None of us is morphologically identical to those ancestral Africans; rather,we share with them an evolved capacity for wide behavioural variability (Shea 2011).These facts stand in contrast to ‘primordialist’ claims that particular ethnic groups havesurvived largely unchanged since Pleistocene times (e.g. Sollas 1911). Here, we reviewrecent arguments linking the San populations of southern Africa with the late PleistoceneLater Stone Age (LSA) (c. 44 kya) at Border Cave, South Africa (d’Errico et al. 2012).These and other claims for the Pleistocene antiquity of modern-day cultures arise from afundamental misunderstanding of the nature of cultural and archaeological taxonomies, andare a misuse of analogical reasoning. Our discussion is relevant not only in southern Africa,but to archaeologists everywhere.

1 Interdepartmental Doctoral Program in Anthropological Sciences, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794,USA (Email: justin.pargeter@stonybrook.edu)

2 Department of Anthropology and Development Studies, University of Johannesburg, Auckland Park 2006, SouthAfrica

3 Centre for Archaeological Science, School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Wollongong,Northfields Avenue, Wollongong, NSW 2522, Australia

4 School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Private Bag X3,Wits 2050, South Africa

5 School of Archaeology, University of Oxford, 36 Beaumont Street, Oxford OX1 2PG, UK6 Anthropology Department, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794, USA7 Museum of Anthropological Archaeology, University of Michigan, 1109 Geddes Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-

1079, USA8 Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, Private Bag X3, Wits 2050, South Africa

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Background

Analogies are a critical component of archaeological thinking (Wylie 1989). They come intwo primary forms: direct historical, and relational. Direct historical analogies require that ademonstrated cultural continuity exists between source and subject. They are equivalent toproposing homologous relationships in genetic and cultural evolutionary studies (Shennan2009). Due to the difficulties with using archaeology to trace living communities directlyback into the past, analogies that assume heritable continuity are rarely unproblematic (Lane1994–1995).

Relational analogies require that a relational link (functional, raw material or ecologicalresemblances, for example) exists between source and subject. By this logic, relationalanalogies explore the causes for apparent similarities and differences. This form of analogyrequires that the quality of an analogical argument be assessed by examining whether therelevance and relational structure of the analogy are valid in the first place.

The San populations of southern Africa are among the best known and best documentedethnographic hunter-gatherers; they have been studied extensively over the past 150 years(Biesele et al. 1986). These studies have generated models of foraging, mobility, siteformation, kinship and exchange (among other cultural facets), each taken to have broadanalogical relevance to our understanding of hunter-gatherer behaviour (e.g. Lee & DeVore1976). This relevance extends up to and includes employing the Kalahari San as archetypal,mobile hunter-gatherers in many introductory anthropology texts. The data underlyingthese models, however, derive predominantly from just three groups: the now extinct /Xamof South Africa’s Northern Cape Province, the Ju/’hoansi of the north-western Kalahariand the G/wi of central Botswana (Mitchell 2010). All three groups come from whatare now relatively resource-marginal, arid and semi-arid areas (Figure 1). Measured on arange of variables—meat consumption, mobility, plant food consumption, use of aquaticresources and so on—they are far from archetypal hunter-gatherers (Kelly 2013). Morefundamentally, their location, behaviours and identities are the product of centuries ofinteraction and integration in complex, shifting socio-political landscapes, the influences ofwhich were active in the relatively recent past and remain so today (Solway & Lee 1990).

Notions of a mutable and evolving San identity propelled the so-called ‘Kalaharidebates’, which questioned the ‘pristineness’ of populations depicted in the classic Kalahariethnographies of the mid twentieth century, and their usefulness as analogues for prehistoricpopulations (see Denbow 1984; Schrire 1984; Solway & Lee 1990; Wilmsen & Denbow1990; Gordon 1992). Yet conceptualisations of ethnographically documented San groupsas, in some sense, holotypes of a deeper, southern African hunter-gatherer identity continueto affect how archaeological, genetic and linguistic research is carried out (e.g. Kim et al.2014: 6).

That multiple analysts put ‘San’ and ‘Khoisan’ peoples close to the genetic root of theHomo sapiens family tree may itself encourage a view of them as ‘primordial’. Proponentsof primordialism see ethnic identity as fixed and persistent over long stretches of time(see Geertz 1963; Isaacs 1974). In archaeology, primordialism is conceptually aligned withculture-history, which assumes that “bounded, homogeneous cultural entities correlate withparticular peoples, ethnic groups, tribes, and/or races” (Jones 1997: 24). Beginning in

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Figure 1. The location of Border Cave in relation to the main geographic sources of ‘San’ ethnography.

the 1960s, primordialism and traditional cultural-historical archaeology suffered a seriesof devastating critiques centred on their inability to explain the permeability of ethnicboundaries, the historical and situational variability of individual and group identity, andprocesses of cultural change. In this vein, claims that a cultural pattern called ‘San’ canbe traced back into the Pleistocene ignore the effects of servitude, assimilation, politicallandscape change, genocide and interbreeding on the demography and political economyof click-speaking groups, as well as the fact that the ‘San’ fall into three distinct languagefamilies (Guldemann 2008). Add in the impacts of successive shifts in climate and ecologyon human demography, and tracing cultural identities back into the Pleistocene becomes atheoretically flawed exercise.

Border Cave and the origin of ‘San’ material cultureUnit 1WA (>40 kya) at Border Cave has been claimed to show the origin of San materialculture and the LSA in southern Africa (d’Errico et al. 2012). Recent analyses demonstratethe presence, by c. 44 kya, of poisons, bone and tusk implements, shell beads, woodendigging sticks and ground stone artefacts said to be similar in form to those used by KalahariSan groups. These finds have revived notions of a late Pleistocene ancestry for the ‘San’. Herewe employ a formal approach (see Van Reybrouck 2012) to examine the direct historicalanalogy between the evidence from Border Cave and the ‘San’.C© Antiquity Publications Ltd, 2016

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Table 1. Select examples of Border Cave ‘San’ material culture found beyond theKalahari.

Trait Presence beyond the Kalahari Reference

Notched bone Domuztepe, Turkey (Neolithic) Carter & Campbell 2000Bone awls Yamana, Argentina Borrero & Borella 2010Bone points Netsilik Inuit, Canada Balicki 1970Use of poison Mbuti, Congo-Kinshasa Ichikawa 1983Digging sticks Yiwara, Australia Gould 1969Digging stick weights Chumash, USA Sutton 2014

In discussing the relevance of the Border Cave materials, d’Errico et al. (2012) choseonly a single ethnographic example for comparison: the ‘San’. When this comparative netis cast wider, as shown in Table 1, it is clear that the San are not the only groups to employsuch items. Bone awls, bone points, digging sticks and digging stick weights are all foundin ethnographic contexts wholly unrelated to the San. Flueggea virosa, the wood speciesprobably used to make the Border Cave digging stick, is widely employed across southern,western and eastern Africa (d’Errico et al. 2012), implying a general, rather than culturallyspecific, application for this material. Digging stick weights are far from universal amongethnographically attested San and go unmentioned in Kalahari ethnography, although theywere used by nineteenth-century /Xam (Ouzman 1997). If indeed these objects are soinseparable from San identity and social organisation as to signal their presence at BorderCave, then their absence from certain San groups, and presence in non-San groups, needsto be explained.

The choice of source material in the Border Cave analogy is also questionable. WhichSan groups are being referenced: the desert-dwelling Ju/’hoansi, riverine fisher-herders suchas the Deti, or the now goat-keeping G/wi? Each of these groups is the product of differenthistorical contingencies far removed from the mountainous contexts of south-east southernAfrica where Border Cave is located (Figure 1). These contingencies are manifest in variableworldviews and economies (Barnard 1992) that represent anything but an “unambiguousparallel” (d’Errico et al. 2012: 13218) with the artefacts at Border Cave.

D’Errico et al. (2012) claim that the bone points and other items of material culturefound at Border Cave are similar enough to those found amongst San communities tosuggest a direct cultural link. To explore the issue of similarity between the Border Cavematerials and various source data more systematically, we conducted statistical tests on theBorder Cave bone point morphological data presented in SI Table 2 of d’Errico et al. (2012)(Table 2). We used their comparative data on width and thickness for San bone points in theFourie ethnographic collection from Namibia (n = 50), and bone points found at the SouthAfrican Iron Age complex of Mapungubwe (n = 25). For our comparisons, we employedKruskal-Wallis tests, a form of non-parametric ANOVA. Our results (Table 2) demonstratethat the Border Cave bone points are statistically indistinguishable from those in theFourie collection, but that they are also indistinguishable from those made at Mapungubwe(non-San). D’Errico et al. (2012) left this similarity between the Border Cave and non-‘San’bone points undiscussed.

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Table 2. Statistical comparisons of the d’Errico et al.(2012) bone point morphological data.

Measurement Comparison P-value

Width at 5mm Border Cave-MapungubweBorder Cave-San

Thickness at 5mm Border Cave-MapungubweBorder Cave-San

Width at 10mm Border Cave-Mapungubwe >0.01Border Cave-San

Thickness at 10mm Border Cave-MapungubweBorder Cave-San

Width at 30mm Border Cave-MapungubweBorder Cave-San

Thickness at 30mm Border Cave-MapungubweBorder Cave-San

Table 3. Putative ‘San’ traits and their presence in southern Africa’s major late Pleistocenetechnocomplexes. 0: absent, 0.5: rare; 1: common. Data from Mitchell (2002) and Lombard et al.(2012).

Still Bay Howiesons Post-Howiesons Early LSA Robberg Oakhurst Wilton

c. 77–70 kya Poort c. 66–58 kya Poort c. 58–45 kya c. 44–22 kya c. 22–12 kya c. 12–7 kya c. 8–4 kya

Confirmedpoisons

0 0 0 0.5 0 0 1

Bone ornaments 1 0 0.5 0 0 1 1

Wooden diggingsticks

0 0 0 0.5 0 0 1

Bone points/awls

0 1 0 0.5 0.5 1 1

Bored stones 0 0 0 0.5 0 0.5 1

Marine shellbeads

1 1 0 0.5 0.5 0.5 1

Ostrich eggshellornaments

1 1 0.5 0.5 0.5 1 1

Total 3 3 1 3 1.5 4 7

Editor’s note: please see comments on this table in d’Errico et al., and in the present authors’ final reply, both of which are inthis issue.

D’Errico et al. (2012) focus only on how the poisons, bone implements, ostrich eggshellbeads and ground stone artefacts are similar to those found at Border Cave, not on the waysin which these items might differ or be discontinuous over time. For example, the Nassariuskraussianus beads found there have no referent in Ju/’hoan ethnography (Lee & DeVore1976). Bone implements are also exceedingly rare for the 30 000 years following Unit 1WAat Border Cave, as are bored stones (Mitchell 2002).

Table 3 shows the occurrence of the Border Cave material claimed to be ‘San’ comparedto the major late Pleistocene Stone Age techno-complexes of southern Africa. These dataC© Antiquity Publications Ltd, 2016

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show that six of the seven techno-complexes exhibit very little by way of material culturepatterning that can be referred to as ‘San’-like by Border Cave standards. The only periodcontaining these items consistently is the Wilton (c. 8–2 kya). Thus, in the case of theBorder Cave finds, there is currently very little evidence of continuity in this package ofmaterial culture across the approximately 40 000 years plus implied by d’Errico et al. (2012).Moreover, as most of these organic items have preservation biases, they should not be takento indicate the presence/absence of the ‘San’ in the Pleistocene archaeological record (cf.Henshilwood & Marean 2006).

But even if we are to assume that a level of uniformitarianism existed in the BorderCave material, it need imply nothing more than strong, sustained and stabilising selectivepressure on those artefact designs, not on ‘San culture’ as a whole. All late Pleistocenesouthern Africans were Homo sapiens with human cognitive abilities (Lombard & Parsons2011). Facing a need for bone tools, glues and projectile weapons of one kind or another,they surveyed their environment, devised a range of effective solutions and stuck with themuntil those needs changed.

ConclusionThe fundamental problem with trying to identify a ‘San culture’ in the Pleistocene is that thistaxonomic unit holds little internal or external validity. Scientists generate taxonomic unitsto explore patterns in data. Named ethnographic cultures are abstract taxonomic conceptscreated by anthropologists and historians in reference to fluid human identities (Bayart et al.2005). There is a difference between cultures as anthropological taxa and the cultural traitsthat they comprise. Taxa are stable and finite (albeit variably well defined). Cultural traits,such as ideas, languages and ways of doing things, are fluid, being transmitted with varyingdegrees of fidelity, altered, combined and recombined in multiple different configurationsover long time-spans. Genes behave in a similar way. At any given time slice in this fluidcontinuum—including the ‘ethnographic present’—it is possible to identify a given culturalgroup in terms of its particular combination of traits, and to assign it a name. Yet if we tracea descendant population through multiple time slices, its cultural traits will be variouslyinherited, blended, lost or reinvented depending on selective pressures mediated by historicalcontingency (McGranaghan 2014). The characteristics of these cultures are not immutable.These factors make the use of direct historical analogy (or homology) in the search forspecific named ethnographic cultures in the deep recesses of the archaeological record afundamentally flawed endeavour.

Finally, why should anthropologists working outside southern Africa care about thisissue? They should care because knowledge claims based on science have power that thosederived from other sources do not. The concept that particular human cultures can betraced into deep time, and have thereby remained essentially unchanged over vast periodsand across evolutionary timescales, is one such idea. Unchallenged, politicians and otherdemagogues have used, and will use, pseudo-scientific claims—about one culture’s purityand lost glories, and another’s inability to change with the times—to justify war, economicinjustice, development agendas and even genocide (Kuper 1988). Just as a former generationof anthropologists spoke out forthrightly against fixed and invariable ‘racial’ taxonomies as

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an organising principle for society (Montagu 1945), anthropologists today also need tospeak out when we see claims about fixed and invariable human ‘cultures’ used for similarpurposes. We must not forget that it is not that long since links between some San groupsand their ‘Stone Age culture’ were invoked as a pretext for resettling them away from thosefragments of land that they still retained (Survival 2010).

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KIM, H.L., A. RATAN, G.H. PERRY, A. MONTENEGRO,W. MILLER & S.C. SCHUSTER. 2014. Khoisanhunter-gatherers have been the largest populationthroughout most of modern-human demographichistory. Nature Communications 5: article 5692.http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139176132

KUPER, A. 1988. The invention of primitive society.London: Routledge.

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LEE, R.B. & I. DEVORE (ed.). 1976. Kalaharihunter-gatherers. Cambridge (MA): HarvardUniversity Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674430600

LOMBARD, M. & I. PARSONS. 2011. What happened tothe human mind after the Howiesons Poort?Antiquity 85: 1433–43.http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0003598X00062153

LOMBARD, M., L. WADLEY, J. DEACON, S. WURZ,I. PARSONS, M. MOHAPI, J. SWART &P.J. MITCHELL. 2012. South African and LesothoStone Age sequence updates (I). South AfricanArchaeological Bulletin 67: 123–40.

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MCGRANAGHAN, M. 2014. ‘Different people’ comingtogether: representations of alterity in /XamBushman (San) narrative. Critical Arts 28: 670–88.http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02560046.2014.929223

MITCHELL, P.J. 2002. The archaeology of southern Africa.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

– 2010. Genetics and southern African prehistory: anarchaeological view. Journal of AnthropologicalScience 88: 73–92.

MONTAGU, M.F.A. 1945. Man’s most dangerous myth:the fallacy of race. New York: Columbia UniversityPress.

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SCHRIRE, C. 1984. Wild surmises on savage thoughts,in C. Schrire (ed.) Past and present inhunter-gatherer studies. Orlando (FL): Academic.

SHEA, J.J. 2011. Homo sapiens is as Homo sapiens was:behavioural variability vs ‘behavioural modernity’ inPalaeolithic archaeology. Current Anthropology 52:1–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/658067

SHENNAN, S. 2009. Pattern and process in culturalevolution. Berkeley: University of California Press.

SOLLAS, W.J. 1911. Ancient hunters and their modernrepresentatives. London: Macmillan.

SOLWAY, J.S. & R.B. LEE. 1990. Foragers, genuine orspurious? Situating the Kalahari San in history.Current Anthropology 31: 109–46.http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/203816

STRINGER, C.B. 2012. Lone survivors: how we came to bethe only humans on Earth. New York: Henry Holt.

Survival. 2010. Botswana president in racist outburstagainst Kalahari Bushmen, 10 December 2010.Available at:http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/6754(accessed 9 February 2016).

SUTTON, E.A. 2014. Digging stick weights anddoughnut stones: an analysis of perforated stonesfrom the Santa Barbara Channel region. Journal ofCalifornia and Great Basin Anthropology 34: 17–42.

VAN REYBROUCK, D. 2012. From primitives to primates:a history of ethnographic and primatological analogiesin the study of prehistory. Leiden: Sidestone.

WYLIE, A. 1989. Archaeological cables and tacking: theimplications of practice for Bernstein’s optionsbeyond objectivism and relativism. Philosophy of theSocial Sciences 19: 1–18.http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/004839318901900101

WILMSEN, E.N. & J.R. DENBOW. 1990. Paradigmatichistory of San-speaking peoples and currentattempts at revision. Current Anthropology 31:489–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/203890

The ‘to be or not to be’ ofarchaeological enquiryFrancesco d’Errico1,2, Paola Villa1,3, Ilaria Degano4, Jeanette Lucejko4,Maria Perla Colombini4 & Peter Beaumont5

Pargeter and colleagues do not escape the dangers inherent in the exercise they embark on.The first is that of creating a straw man argument in which one exaggerates and misinterpretswhat was said in the article being criticised. The second is that of using your time to look

1 CNRS UMR 5199, PACEA, Universite de Bordeaux, Allee Geoffroy Saint Hilaire, CS 50023 F–33615 PessacCEDEX, Pessac, France (Email: francesco.derrico@u-bordeaux.fr)

2 Evolutionary Studies Institute and DST/NRF Centre of Excellence in Palaeosciences & School of Geosciences,University of the Witwatersrand, Private Bag 3, Wits, 2050 Johannesburg, South Africa

3 University of Colorado Museum, 1030 Broadway, Boulder, CO 80309-0265, USA4 Dipartimento di Chimica e Chimica Industriale, Universita di Pisa, via Risorgimento 35, 56126 Pisa, Italy5 Archaeology Department, McGregor Museum, Egerton Road, Kimberley 8300, South Africa

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The ‘to be or not to be’ of archaeological enquiry

Francesco d'Errico, Paola Villa, Ilaria Degano, Jeanette Lucejko, Maria Perla Colombini and PeterBeaumont

Antiquity / Volume 90 / Issue 352 / August 2016, pp 1079 - 1082DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2016.101, Published online: 19 July 2016

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0003598X16001010

How to cite this article:Francesco d'Errico, Paola Villa, Ilaria Degano, Jeanette Lucejko, Maria Perla Colombini and PeterBeaumont (2016). The ‘to be or not to be’ of archaeological enquiry. Antiquity, 90, pp 1079-1082doi:10.15184/aqy.2016.101

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MCGRANAGHAN, M. 2014. ‘Different people’ comingtogether: representations of alterity in /XamBushman (San) narrative. Critical Arts 28: 670–88.http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02560046.2014.929223

MITCHELL, P.J. 2002. The archaeology of southern Africa.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

– 2010. Genetics and southern African prehistory: anarchaeological view. Journal of AnthropologicalScience 88: 73–92.

MONTAGU, M.F.A. 1945. Man’s most dangerous myth:the fallacy of race. New York: Columbia UniversityPress.

OUZMAN, S. 1997. Between margin and centre: thearchaeology of southern African bored stones, inL. Wadley (ed.) Our gendered past: archaeologicalstudies of gender in southern Africa: 71–106.Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.

SCHRIRE, C. 1984. Wild surmises on savage thoughts,in C. Schrire (ed.) Past and present inhunter-gatherer studies. Orlando (FL): Academic.

SHEA, J.J. 2011. Homo sapiens is as Homo sapiens was:behavioural variability vs ‘behavioural modernity’ inPalaeolithic archaeology. Current Anthropology 52:1–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/658067

SHENNAN, S. 2009. Pattern and process in culturalevolution. Berkeley: University of California Press.

SOLLAS, W.J. 1911. Ancient hunters and their modernrepresentatives. London: Macmillan.

SOLWAY, J.S. & R.B. LEE. 1990. Foragers, genuine orspurious? Situating the Kalahari San in history.Current Anthropology 31: 109–46.http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/203816

STRINGER, C.B. 2012. Lone survivors: how we came to bethe only humans on Earth. New York: Henry Holt.

Survival. 2010. Botswana president in racist outburstagainst Kalahari Bushmen, 10 December 2010.Available at:http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/6754(accessed 9 February 2016).

SUTTON, E.A. 2014. Digging stick weights anddoughnut stones: an analysis of perforated stonesfrom the Santa Barbara Channel region. Journal ofCalifornia and Great Basin Anthropology 34: 17–42.

VAN REYBROUCK, D. 2012. From primitives to primates:a history of ethnographic and primatological analogiesin the study of prehistory. Leiden: Sidestone.

WYLIE, A. 1989. Archaeological cables and tacking: theimplications of practice for Bernstein’s optionsbeyond objectivism and relativism. Philosophy of theSocial Sciences 19: 1–18.http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/004839318901900101

WILMSEN, E.N. & J.R. DENBOW. 1990. Paradigmatichistory of San-speaking peoples and currentattempts at revision. Current Anthropology 31:489–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/203890

The ‘to be or not to be’ ofarchaeological enquiryFrancesco d’Errico1,2, Paola Villa1,3, Ilaria Degano4, Jeanette Lucejko4,Maria Perla Colombini4 & Peter Beaumont5

Pargeter and colleagues do not escape the dangers inherent in the exercise they embark on.The first is that of creating a straw man argument in which one exaggerates and misinterpretswhat was said in the article being criticised. The second is that of using your time to look

1 CNRS UMR 5199, PACEA, Universite de Bordeaux, Allee Geoffroy Saint Hilaire, CS 50023 F–33615 PessacCEDEX, Pessac, France (Email: francesco.derrico@u-bordeaux.fr)

2 Evolutionary Studies Institute and DST/NRF Centre of Excellence in Palaeosciences & School of Geosciences,University of the Witwatersrand, Private Bag 3, Wits, 2050 Johannesburg, South Africa

3 University of Colorado Museum, 1030 Broadway, Boulder, CO 80309-0265, USA4 Dipartimento di Chimica e Chimica Industriale, Universita di Pisa, via Risorgimento 35, 56126 Pisa, Italy5 Archaeology Department, McGregor Museum, Egerton Road, Kimberley 8300, South Africa

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at the speck of dust in your brother’s eye instead of paying attention to the plank in yourown. The third, if you are lucky enough to find a sympathetic journal, is to rehash the samecriticism over and over in multiple articles, changing the tone from very moderate (Mitchell2012) to more aggressive (Pargeter 2014), which inevitably pushes your opponents and anysensible reader to wonder about your motivations.

Pargeter et al.’s attempt to make us appear as the followers of Kossinna “ein Volk, ein Topf” isridiculous. Let us, to start, make it short and clear. Did we ever claim in our articles (d’Erricoet al. 2012; Villa et al. 2012) that our results indicated that the people living at Border Cave44 kya were San, ancestors of the San, speaking a San language or in any way biologicallyrelated to the San? No. Did we write that our results supported cultural continuity—meaning a persistence of beliefs, morals, laws, rituals, customs, social organisation andlanguage—between the Border Cave inhabitants and present-day or historically knownSan? No.

In our articles, we directly date, reassess the stratigraphic provenance and analyse with anumber of advanced analytical techniques never previously applied in combination to a siteof this period—an input that Pargeter et al. try their best to hide—the lithic assemblagesand a number of organic artefacts recovered from Border Cave. We retrace in detail changesin lithic technology occurring at the site between 60 kya and 40 kya, and observe that,although not identical, a number of items dated to or occurring in the 44–40 kya layers, andone dated to 24 kya, resemble those found at Later Stone Age (LSA) sites known to be usedby historical or contemporary San hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari. We relied upon thissimilarity to reach the conclusion that a cultural adaptation—meaning a set of technologicalinnovations and specific artefacts types, including symbolic items—similar in a number ofrespects to those known at LSA sites and among San populations is observed at Border Cavec. 44 kya. It is in this sense, and in this sense only, that we proposed a degree of continuitywith more recent hunter-gatherer adaptations.

With that established, we can move on to other claims that Pargeter et al. make. Did weraise the possibility that this novel cultural adaptation may reflect the emergence of moreevanescent cultural traits, on which archaeology notoriously has little grasp, characteristic ofhistorically known San? Yes. Did we claim to have demonstrated that such a link exists? No.Do we consider this to be a matter of archaeological enquiry? Yes. In fact, the field of geneticresearch has successfully accumulated data on this issue for the last 30 years, and what dowe know about the possible resilience of cultural traits in hunter-gatherer populations livingin southern Africa between 40 kya and the present? Virtually nothing. Is it the destiny ofarchaeology to remain mute on this topic, or do we have the means to sharpen our heuristicand analytical tools, ‘take arms against a sea of troubles, and, by opposing, end them’?Pargeter and colleagues are free to think that it is ‘nobler in the mind to suffer the slings andarrows of outrageous fortune’—in other words, to be unequivocally against the idea thatsuch an endeavour should be embraced.

The ways in which Pargeter et al. attempt to show that our approach is, however, notfeasible or that our inferences can be rejected are inadequate. A six-entry table (Pargeteret al. above: tab. 1) indicating that ‘bone points’, ‘bone awls’, ‘use of poison’ and ‘notchedbone’ are used elsewhere on the planet by traditional societies cannot be considered a seriousmeans of demonstrating or disproving anything. These categories are too broad to carryC© Antiquity Publications Ltd, 2016

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any significance in this debate. From this table, we know nothing about the technology,appearance, size or function of the artefacts, and the cultural contexts in which each of themoccur apparently do not feature the others, rendering such examples even more irrelevanthere. Are the ‘bone points’ of the Netsilik Inuit hafted and used as spear points or as arrowtips, and, if the latter, with what kind of bow? Do the tips of their points display tinyincisions similar to those that we have identified at Border Cave, reminiscent of the marksof ownership made by San on their bone arrow points? How do the Mbuti from Congouse poison? Do they apply it with poison applicators consisting of thin, notched woodenrods similar to that found at Border Cave, which still retains traces of poison and is virtuallyidentical to those used historically and at present by San hunters? Do the digging sticksused by the Yiwarea in Australia have a bevelled tip similar in size and morphology to thatfound at Border Cave and at LSA sites, and, as with the Border Cave example, a diameterfalling in the range of those found at LSA sites and in San ethnographic collections? Clearly,the degree of refinement that we have applied in our analysis of material culture fromBorder Cave and other Middle Stone Age (MSA) sites in the last 15 years is not one thatPargeter et al. are used to, and, we argue, represents what is needed to address such questionseffectively.

The second table (Pargeter et al. above: tab. 2) that they present to ‘disprove’ our inferencesabout Border Cave bone tools also misses the mark. Did we ever claim, as Pargeter andcolleagues imply, that Border Cave bone points were morphometrically distinct from allbone tools produced on the planet apart from those of the San? No. Border Cave points arebroken, which unfortunately prevents a proper morphometric comparison with LSA andethnographic arrow points. Measurable variables, however, show that Border Cave points areperfectly comparable to those recorded in more recent contexts and, more importantly, thatthey are significantly different from previous MSA examples. Pargeter et al. fail to understandthat similarities between Border Cave artefacts and LSA or more recent subsistence strategiesneed to be measured in the light of differences with previous MSA cultures. Of the ten novelcultural features appearing at Border Cave in early LSA layers (ostrich eggshell beads, smallbone points, digging stick, bored stones, beeswax mixed with resin, tar made from yellowwood used for hafting, poison, a poison applicator, notched bone objects and Nassarius shellbeads) only two are known in the MSA, and for one of them (Nassarius shell beads) we wereable to show that the way in which they were strung does not conform with that observedat MSA sites (Vanhaeren et al. 2013).

Pargeter et al.’s Table 3 is nonsensical in that it grossly underestimates the potential roleof taphonomic processes and excavation techniques on the occurrence of the artefact typesthey list in the table. Organic material is exceptionally well preserved at Border Cave forreasons linked to the special geological setting of this cave (Beaumont 1978; d’Errico et al.2012). Most of the items discussed here are very small in size. How many were recoveredat LSA excavations conducted without sieving or with 5mm sieves? A number of theseitems are made of perishable and fragile material that disintegrates during excavation iftime-consuming precautions are not taken. It is very telling that no bone tools, engravedochre or shell beads were found at Still Bay sites; no engraved ostrich egg shells at HowiesonsPoort (HP) sites; and no bone tools at HP and post-HP sites before the careful excavationsconducted at Blombos, Diepkloof and Sibudu caves; and this in spite of dozens of sites

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of these periods having been excavated previously. In addition, we notice that Table 3contains a number of factual errors. Contrary to what Pargeter and colleagues put intheir database, no bone ornaments and no ostrich eggshell ornaments are known at StillBay sites. These sites have instead yielded bone points and bone awls, which are listed asabsent in their Table 3. Also, no ostrich eggshell ornaments have been found, to the bestof our knowledge, in HP layers, and no bone ornaments are signalled at post-HP sites.First looking at the plank in your own eye is advisable before criticising someone else’swork.

There are ways to move on in this debate constructively. The first is to document Sanmaterial culture better from an ethnoarchaeological perspective. The San populations havebeen widely documented ethnographically, but with the exception of few amendable studies,little has been done to produce data describing their technology with the degree of precisionthat can be used by archaeologists when analysing past material culture. We are carryingout this work (see, for example, Wadley et al. 2015) with the help of San elders and theanalysis of unpublished museum collections. Second, Border Cave and other early LSA siteshave not revealed all of their secrets. The ongoing reappraisal of some material found atBorder Cave (d’Errico & Backwell 2016) and the new excavations recently commencedat this site may provide better insights into the processes that led to the emergence ofthe cultural innovations discussed here and their eventual maintenance in more recentpopulations.

ReferencesBEAUMONT, P. 1978. Border Cave. Cape Town:

University of Cape Town.

D’ERRICO, F. & L. BACKWELL. 2016. Earliest evidenceof personal ornaments associated with burial: theConus shells from Border Cave. Journal of HumanEvolution 93: 91–108.http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2016.01.002

D’ERRICO, F., L. BACKWELL, P. VILLA, I. DEGANO,J.J. LUCEJKO, M.K. BAMFORD, T. HIGHAM,M.P. COLOMBINI & P. BEAUMONT. 2012. Earlyevidence of San material culture represented byorganic artifacts from Border Cave, South Africa.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of theUSA 109: 13214–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1204213109

MITCHELL, P. 2012. San origins and transitions to theLater Stone Age: new research from Border Cave,South Africa. South African Journal of Science 108:11–12. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/sajs.v108i11/12.1447

PARGETER, J. 2014. The Later Stone Age is not Sanprehistory. The Digging Stick 31: 1–4.

VANHAEREN, M., F. D’ERRICO, K. VAN NIEKERK,C.S. HENSHILWOOD & R. ERASMUS. 2013.Thinking strings: additional evidence for personalornament use in the Middle Stone Age of BlombosCave, South Africa. Journal of Human Evolution 64:500–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2013.02.001

VILLA, P., S. SORIANO, T. TSANOVA, I. DEGANO,T. HIGHAM, F. D’ERRICO, L. BACKWELL,J.J. LUCEJKO, M.P. COLOMBINI & P. BEAUMONT.2012. Border Cave and the beginning of the LaterStone Age in South Africa. Proceedings of theNational Academy of Sciences of the USA 109:13208–13. http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1202629109

WADLEY, L., G. TROWER, L. BACKWELL & F. D’ERRICO.2015. Traditional glue, adhesive and poison usedfor composite weapons by Ju/’hoan San in NyaeNyae, Namibia. Implications for the evolution ofhunting equipment in prehistory. PLoS ONE10(10): e0140269. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0140269

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Nothing wrong with reasoned speculation

Alan Barnard

Antiquity / Volume 90 / Issue 352 / August 2016, pp 1084 - 1085DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2016.102, Published online: 19 July 2016

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0003598X16001022

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the contexts of change and variation in which they were embedded, in that way detractingfrom those contexts, and deflecting from the real problems of the present and its pasts.

ReferencesWOBST, H.M. 1989. The origination of Homo sapiens,

or the invention, control and manipulation ofmodern human nature. Conference Pre-Print.Wenner Gren Foundation international symposium‘Critical approaches in archeology: material life,meaning, and power’, Cascais, Portugal, 17–25March 1989. New York: Wenner Gren Foundation.

Nothing wrong with reasonedspeculationAlan Barnard∗

In essence, Pargeter et al. argue that claims for the antiquity of modern San ‘cultures’ involvea misuse of analogical reasoning. In general, I agree. But, let me take issue with a few ofthe specifics they discuss, and argue instead that things may be more complicated than theyseem.

It is perfectly true that I once claimed a greater diversity for San peoples than hadpreviously been recognised (Barnard 1992). This is especially true for aspects of kinship andfor settlement patterns. For other things, however, particularly religious beliefs and practices,it is less true (see Barnard 1988). From one end of southern Africa to the other, we do finddiversity, although we also find great similarities, even in the vocabulary employed to discusssuch things: words for ‘God’ and for ritual activities, for example. How old these are, we ofcourse do not know, but the possibility exists that they are very ancient and even part of anUrkultur such as that which seems to exist both in High God concepts and in mythologicalsystems. The latter may even exist across the continents, which means, therefore, throughlong periods of time (see Witzel 2012).

I have no idea how ancient Border Cave cultural practices may be. The authors citeGuldemann (2008), however, on the fact that the ‘San’ occupy three different languagefamilies. What they do not say is that he has characterised the Kalahari Basin as a wholeas a Sprachbund, a collectivity of languages that have through time merged together, ratherthan having split from a common source as with Indo-European. This makes every bitof sense to me: language families can only be traced 7000 or 8000 years back, but this is

∗ School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, Chrystal Macmillan Building, 15a George Square,Edinburgh EH8 9LD, UK

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not to say that there may not be a degree of continuity over a longer period. Languagesdiverge and converge over very long periods, and it is quite normal for hunter-gatherersto speak many languages. During my last visit to the Kalahari in 2011, I met a N!aqriaxeman who could speak languages in five different language families (the three ‘San’ onesand two others). Some of these have grammars that are among the most complex inthe world. Naro (my primary fieldwork language) has 86 person-gender-number markers./Xam has at least six verbal suffixes, 24 verbal prefixes and some 14 ways to make aplural.

How do we know the linguistic history of the subcontinent? What is to say that thesituation 40 000 or 50 000 years ago was significantly different? In Language in prehistory(Barnard 2016), I discuss the probability that every Pleistocene hunter-gatherer spoke manylanguages, and that these languages existed for a purpose, namely the transmission of ideasthrough myth: myths spread far and wide and across language-family boundaries. Throughgenetic and linguistic evidence we know that the Naro probably spoke a Ju/’hoan-likelanguage before they acquired a Khoe one (Pickrell et al. 2012). This is also borne out bychanges in Naro kinship structure, and of course the 15 000 Naro alive today were notthe same ‘people’ as then. Those who eventually became ‘the Naro’ were, a few hundredor thousand years ago, probably a very small, multilingual population, numbering perhapsonly in the hundreds.

If we put all this together, who is to say exactly what the prehistory of Border Cave mayhave been. At times, I prefer reasoned speculation over either direct historical analogy orrelational analogy. I leave it to archaeologists to explore this idea further.

ReferencesBARNARD, A. 1988. Structure and fluidity in Khoisan

religious ideas. Journal of Religion in Africa 18(3):216–36.

– 1992. Hunters and herders of southern Africa: acomparative ethnography of the Khoisan peoples.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

– 2016. Language in prehistory. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

GULDEMANN, T. 2008. A linguist’s view: Khoe-Kwadispeakers as the earliest food-producers of southernAfrica. Southern African Humanities 20: 93–132.

PICKRELL, J.K., N. PATTERSON, C. BARBIERI,F. BERTHOLD, L. GERLACH, T. GULDEMANN,B. KURE, S.W. MPOLAKA, H. NAKAGAWA,C. NAUMANN, M. LIPSON, P.R. LOH, J. LACHANCE,J. MOUNTAIN, C.D. BUSTAMANTE, B. BERGER,S.A. TISHKOFF, B. HENN, M. STONEKING,D. REICH & B. PAKENDORF. 2012. The geneticprehistory of southern Africa. NatureCommunications 3: article 1143.http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms2140

WITZEL, E.J.M. 2012. The origins of the world’smythologies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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The analogy generation game

H. Martin Wobst

Antiquity / Volume 90 / Issue 352 / August 2016, pp 1083 - 1084DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2016.107, Published online: 19 July 2016

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0003598X16001071

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The analogy generation gameH. Martin Wobst∗

I have grown increasingly allergic to arguments about analogies and origins in archaeology.Analogies are simply devices to stimulate the invention of ideas. The source of intuition isfairly irrelevant for the power of the ideas thus generated. The history of science is full ofexciting hypotheses that had amusing sources, often far removed from the actual contextsto which the idea ultimately applied.

Archaeologists have tended to generate analogies in a kind of a typo-numerical exercise:you start with the elements/traits that you are archaeologically faced with and have questionsabout. You then scan the present, the ‘ethnographic present’, or other pasts, for contextsthat you assume to be more complete than your starting point. That context becomes youranalogy generator that offers the most trait/element congruences with your archaeologicalcase. The more congruences, and the closer in time and space that case is to yourarchaeological context, the more easily the hypotheses that it generates will convince you.This method of hypothesis generation is exactly that—a method of hypothesis generation—and the hypotheses thus generated are not inherently superior to those generated any otherway, with some rather amusing examples from the history of science. They now need to beas vigorously evaluated as any other idea. One should harbour the suspicion that hypothesesgenerated by analogy in the context of foragers might be considerably more pedestrian thanthose inspired by other contexts because of the many problems inherent in the ‘ethnographicpresent’ of foragers (after all, as with the archaeological record, it is also one where pre-contactbehaviours usually were not observable any more).

Similarly, the search for origins is simply a typological dead-end. The descriptive elementsof one’s present (often, the ethnographic present or a select set of its material elements) arechased into the past until all formal coincidence ultimately disappears (when a ‘point oforigin’ has been located). Or a complex of descriptive elements (e.g. ‘some archaeologicallypreservable material elements of recent Kalahari populations’) is matched with precedentco-occurrences of the same elements until the coincidences eventually fizzle out (with ‘theculture of origin’ just overlying that point). Either procedure is processually vacuous. Theresultant data structure (I have called it ‘origination cone’ in a previous publication (Wobst1989)) is simply the result of the mindless sorting procedure. Its shape is pre-given, andits ultimate spatial and temporal referents are the result of the number of attributes onestarts with, rather than any anthropologically interesting relationships or processes. Yetforever after, these points of origin will motivate our explanatory efforts and the largesse ofarchaeological supporters.

There are no easy processual shortcuts that relate Pleistocene and Holocene populationsto each other. Searches for analogies and for origins merely extract cultural elements from

∗ Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 217 Machmer Hall, 240 Hicks Way, Amherst,MA 01003, USA

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the contexts of change and variation in which they were embedded, in that way detractingfrom those contexts, and deflecting from the real problems of the present and its pasts.

ReferencesWOBST, H.M. 1989. The origination of Homo sapiens,

or the invention, control and manipulation ofmodern human nature. Conference Pre-Print.Wenner Gren Foundation international symposium‘Critical approaches in archeology: material life,meaning, and power’, Cascais, Portugal, 17–25March 1989. New York: Wenner Gren Foundation.

Nothing wrong with reasonedspeculationAlan Barnard∗

In essence, Pargeter et al. argue that claims for the antiquity of modern San ‘cultures’ involvea misuse of analogical reasoning. In general, I agree. But, let me take issue with a few ofthe specifics they discuss, and argue instead that things may be more complicated than theyseem.

It is perfectly true that I once claimed a greater diversity for San peoples than hadpreviously been recognised (Barnard 1992). This is especially true for aspects of kinship andfor settlement patterns. For other things, however, particularly religious beliefs and practices,it is less true (see Barnard 1988). From one end of southern Africa to the other, we do finddiversity, although we also find great similarities, even in the vocabulary employed to discusssuch things: words for ‘God’ and for ritual activities, for example. How old these are, we ofcourse do not know, but the possibility exists that they are very ancient and even part of anUrkultur such as that which seems to exist both in High God concepts and in mythologicalsystems. The latter may even exist across the continents, which means, therefore, throughlong periods of time (see Witzel 2012).

I have no idea how ancient Border Cave cultural practices may be. The authors citeGuldemann (2008), however, on the fact that the ‘San’ occupy three different languagefamilies. What they do not say is that he has characterised the Kalahari Basin as a wholeas a Sprachbund, a collectivity of languages that have through time merged together, ratherthan having split from a common source as with Indo-European. This makes every bitof sense to me: language families can only be traced 7000 or 8000 years back, but this is

∗ School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, Chrystal Macmillan Building, 15a George Square,Edinburgh EH8 9LD, UK

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Analogy and the danger of over-simplifying the past

James Denbow

Antiquity / Volume 90 / Issue 352 / August 2016, pp 1086 - 1086DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2016.104, Published online: 19 July 2016

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0003598X16001046

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Analogy and the danger ofover-simplifying the pastJames Denbow∗

This is an excellent and tightly written argument against the indiscriminate and essentialistextension of invented anthropological typologies, such as ‘the San’, back into the Pleistocene.While analogical arguments that relate similarities in excavated tools, poisons and so on tothe repertoire of items used by extant peoples in order to interpret their function is a commonapproach in archaeology, as the authors rightly point out, the extension of these analogiesto include particular cultural and linguistic forms is ‘a theoretically flawed exercise’.

More seriously, such approaches short-circuit more detailed investigations that seek toidentify and investigate differences between prehistoric assemblages that would point togreater diversity in hunter-gatherer adaptations than were recorded in the few detailedethnographies we have of living peoples. No detailed ethnographic or ecological studies, forexample, have ever been carried out amongst the contemporary Khoe who neighbour theJu/’hoa and hunt, gather, fish and tend small stock along the waterways of the Okavango andBoteti, as well as the vast plains surrounding the salt pans of the Makgadikgadi. Such studieswould certainly expand our understanding of the historicity and diversity of hunter-gathereradaptations in southern Africa. They would also problematise overly simplistic relationshipsbetween simple artefact types, such as bone points and beads, and a static and essentialistsocial identity that presupposes cultures living in a time-warp outside the ordinary flow ofhistory (Wolf 1982; Fabian 1983). Sadly, the fact that corrective arguments such as thosemade by Pargeter et al. still (rightly) need to be made, despite the issues raised in the KalahariDebate over 25 years ago (Denbow 1984; Wilmsen & Denbow 1990), suggests that thefilm Groundhog Day reflects a temporal reality.

∗ Department of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA

ReferencesDENBOW, J. 1984. Prehistoric herders and foragers of

the Kalahari: the evidence for 1500 years ofinteraction, in C. Schrire (ed.) Past and present inhunter-gatherer studies: 175–93. Orlando (FL):Academic.

FABIAN, J. 1983. Time and the other: how anthropologymakes its object. New York: Columbia UniversityPress.

WILMSEN, E. & J. DENBOW. 1990. Paradigmatic historyof San-speaking peoples and current attempts atrevision. Current Anthropology 31: 489–524.http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/203890

WOLF, E. 1982. Europe and the people without history.Berkeley: University of California Press.

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‘Primordialism and the ‘Pleistocene San’ of southern Africa’: nal reply

Justin Pargeter, Alex MacKay, Peter Mitchell, John Shea and Brian A. Stewart

Antiquity / Volume 90 / Issue 352 / August 2016, pp 1087 - 1089DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2016.131, Published online: 19 July 2016

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0003598X16001319

How to cite this article:Justin Pargeter, Alex MacKay, Peter Mitchell, John Shea and Brian A. Stewart (2016).‘Primordialism and the ‘Pleistocene San’ of southern Africa’: nal reply. Antiquity, 90, pp 1087-1089doi:10.15184/aqy.2016.131

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‘Primordialism and the ‘PleistoceneSan’ of southern Africa’: final replyJustin Pargeter1,2, Alex MacKay3, Peter Mitchell4,5, John Shea6

& Brian A. Stewart7,8

We thank our colleagues for their insightful comments. The weight of modern evidence isagainst the notion that contemporary human cultures can be tracked backwards into thePleistocene (e.g. Lee & DeVore 1976; Kuper 1988; Wilmsen 1989; Solway & Lee 1990;MacEachern 2000). Modern-day hunter-gatherers are not our Stone Age ancestors. Currentprotestations notwithstanding, the provocative title that d’Errico and colleagues (2012)chose for their paper, ‘Early evidence of San material culture represented by organic artifactsfrom Border Cave, South Africa’, unambiguously asserts the opposite. Our critique of thatpaper’s content does not question the robusticity of the methods employed at Border Cave(for this, see Evans 2012). Rather, our comments focus on the theoretically flawed searchfor a specifically ‘San’ “cultural adaptation” (d’Errico et al. 2012: 13214) at any Pleistocenearchaeological site.

Historically, southern African archaeologists have used ‘San’ ethnography to frame LaterStone Age archaeology (e.g. Goodwin & van Riet Lowe 1929), but this practice has morerecently been roundly criticised (e.g. Parkington 1989; Mitchell 2003; Humphreys 2005;Sealy 2006). The societies lumped together as ‘San’ reflect millennia of interaction, contactand acculturation, resulting in their diverse material cultures and worldviews. Barnard’s(above) encounter with a Kalahari man who spoke five distinct languages highlights thedegree to which the term ‘San’ oversimplifies contemporary cultural variation. As Denbownotes above, extracting so-called ‘San’ cultural elements from the “contexts of change andvariation in which they were embedded” greatly reduces their variability and complexity. Inignoring this variability/complexity, we allow ethnography to dictate higher-order theoryin archaeology. Our alleged ‘re-hashing’ of this point in several venues is a measure of aproblem that d’Errico and colleagues dismiss.

1 Interdepartmental Doctoral Program in Anthropological Sciences, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794,USA (Email: justin.pargeter@stonybrook.edu)

2 Department of Anthropology and Development Studies, University of Johannesburg, Auckland Park 2006, SouthAfrica

3 Centre for Archaeological Science, School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Wollongong,Northfields Avenue, Wollongong, NSW 2522, Australia

4 School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Private Bag X3,Wits 2050, South Africa

5 School of Archaeology, University of Oxford, 36 Beaumont Street, Oxford OX1 2PG, UK6 Anthropology Department, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794, USA7 Museum of Anthropological Archaeology, University of Michigan, 1109 Geddes Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-

1079, USA8 Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, Private Bag X3, Wits 2050, South Africa

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Justin Pargeter et al.

D’Errico et al.’s (2012) choice of examples for “early evidence of San material culture”at Border Cave, and their failure to comprehend our Table 1, highlights the variability andcomplexity that has been overlooked. For example, they lump the Border Cave bone ‘tools’into morpho-functional categories whose integrity remains untested. Do we know that thepointed objects at Border Cave were used as weapon tips rather than as needles, awls or anyof the other myriad functions to which a pointed bone object might have been used? Plainly,we do not. The fact that both the Netsilik Inuit and some ‘San’ groups used bone toolsdoes not prove relatedness, but it does point to broader patterning in this class of object.We partially agree with d’Errico and colleagues that such classes are “too broad” to be a“serious means of demonstrating or disproving anything”. Consistency in coarse classes doesnot prove continuity. Where coarse classes are absent from large numbers of assemblages, wecannot simply draw a dotted line through time and choose to believe that they are maskedby taphonomy or recovery techniques.

Discoveries of bone tools or ostrich-eggshell ornaments at sites beyond southern Africa(e.g. Kabwe, Mumba and Magubike) suggest patterning outside the regions typicallyassociated with ‘San’ ethnography (see Wadley 2015 and references therein). Their discoveryat sites pre-dating the Later Stone Age (e.g. Sibudu Cave and Klasies River Mouth),at sites excavated before the “careful excavations conducted at Blombos, Diepkloof andSibudu caves” (d’Errico et al. above) (including Boomplaas, Cave of Hearths and BushmanRockshelter), and their absence from recently excavated sites with excellent preservation (e.g.Klein et al. 2004) surely attests to the fact that their absence in various parts of the southernAfrican archaeological record is more real than apparent. The fickle nature of these remainsis further accentuated upon removing the Still Bay ostrich-eggshell ornaments from ourTable 3 (their original inclusion in our manuscript was an error, and one inconsequentialto our argument; we thank d’Errico and colleagues for noting this error, although theywere unwilling for it to be corrected in our paper as published). We observe, however, thepresence of notched bone in both the Still Bay and post-Howiesons Poort techno-complexesat Apollo 11 and Sibudu Cave (Cain 2004; Vogelsang et al. 2010), the purpose of which iscurrently unknown. This pattern cannot simply be ascribed to poor organic preservation,inadequate recovery techniques or the size of excavations. As Lombard and Parsons (2011)note, variation of this kind in the late Pleistocene of southern Africa now forms one of themost exciting topics in the region’s hunter-gatherer prehistory.

D’Errico and colleagues (above) rhetorically ask, “What do we know about the possibleresilience of cultural traits in hunter-gatherer populations living in southern Africa between40 kya and the present?”; they then answer, “Virtually nothing”. Actually, we know quite abit (e.g. Deacon 1984; Parkington 1984; Mitchell 1988; Wadley 1993; Sealy 2006). We donot know as much as we might wish, but we know enough to reject the argument that ‘Sanculture’ remained recognisably the same for 40 millennia.

Finally, it is encouraging to note that d’Errico and colleagues have begun more systematicethnoarchaeological research among Kalahari populations, and that Border Cave is beingreinvestigated. These more behavioural, ecological and comparative approaches, grounded insounder understandings of both ethnographic and archaeological contexts, are surely betterways to move forward (e.g. Shea 2011). We join Wobst (above) in hoping that this workleads to the investigation of more “anthropologically interesting relationships or processes”C© Antiquity Publications Ltd, 2016

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Primordialism and the ‘Pleistocene San’ of southern Africa: final reply

than can be attained from a misplaced search for ‘origins’ or primordial ‘Pleistocene San’cultures.

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