Life on the edge or living in the middle? New perspectives on southern Africa's Middle Stone Age

Abstract

Much archaeological research is conducted within the environments, locational and cultural, that archaeologists are familiar and comfortable with. But that which is marginal and difficult today, and that which is central and convenient, may not have been so in the past. To answer new and pressing questions about human evolution, less familiar and less comfortable environments therefore require systematic and prolonged multidisciplinary investigation. With a focus on the extensive Makgadikgadi salt pans of the Middle Kalahari Desert, Botswana, six papers represent the output of systematic investigations and excavations of, predominantly, Middle Stone Age (MSA) archaeology. This multidisciplinary research is insightful for revealing extensive open-air MSA sites throughout the region, that in turn are part of a wider landscape with abundant Stone Age finds (Coulson et al., 2022). Within western Makgadikgadi, five open-air sites are systematically excavated (Staurset et al., 2022a,b) and are given detailed and robust environmental context and Late Quaternary chronology (Burrough et al., 2022), documenting systematic MSA resource use of the dry basin floor (Nash et al., 2022). Together, this work frames a new understanding MSA adaptation to dry environmental conditions in the heart of the Kalahari (Thomas et al., 2022).