Shellfish Exploitation Strategies at the Pinnacle Point Shell Midden Complex, South Africa, During the Later Stone Age

Abstract

ABSTRACTPinnacle Point, Mossel Bay, is best known for the preservation of the earliest evidence for systematic shellfish exploitation by humans during the African Middle Stone Age (MSA). Comparatively little is known about the shellfish gathering strategies of the Later Stone Age (LSA) inhabitants of this region. This article reports on five LSA sites at the Pinnacle Point Shell Midden Complex excavated by the Centre for Heritage and Archaeological Resource Management in 2006 and 2007. These sites represent 2,000 years of hunter-gather and herder settlement and subsistence in the region. Shellfish remains from the five middens were analyzed in order to understand the exploitation patterns of their LSA inhabitants. Information on the relative abundance of different mollusk species in these assemblages and, where possible, the average size of collected specimens, is then compared with published accounts of shellfish material from other sites along the southern Cape coast. These include roughly contemporary assemblages from Noetzie, Hoffman's/Robberg Cave and sites in the Garcia State Forest, and MSA assemblages from Pinnacle Point, Blombos Cave, and Klasies River Mouth. Regional continuities in gathering strategies focused on a range of bivalves and gastropods, and chronological shifts in the exploitation of rocky shores and sandy beaches, and different littoral zones, are apparent.