Diet, Mobility, and Settlement Pattern among Holocene Hunter‐Gatherers in Southernmost Africa

Abstract

Integration of new biological information (stable isotope analyses of archaeological human skeletons) with the archaeological sequence of southernmost Africa and with wider sociocultural studies of hunters and gatherers shows that between 4,500 and 2,000 BP coastal huntergatherers buried on the Robberg Peninsula and adjacent Plettenberg Bay ate large quantities of hightrophiclevel marine protein. This contrasts with more mixed diets reflected in skeletons from Matjes River Rock Shelter, only 14 km along the shore. Assuming that the burials represent the populations that inhabited the sites, such clear economic separation could have come about only if these were two separate groups of people who lived in clearly demarcated, mutually exclusive territories. Such a settlement pattern directly contradicts ethnographic studies of southern African huntergatherers, all derived from inland areas. Later Stone Age material culture, including the assemblages from these sites, shows many similarities to that of twenti...