P5 Pondoland Coastal Foraging and Lifeways Project

For many years, scholars have studied how people interact with their environment when faced with ecological pressures. Like modern people, prehistoric hunter-gatherers are known to have adapted their subsistence, technological, and social behaviors in response to changes in their local environments. These adaptations influenced, among other things, what they ate, where they lived, what kinds of tools they made, and also how they interacted with each other. The archaeological sciences are ideally suited to studying the relationship between people and their environment over long timespans – spanning centuries to tens of thousands of years – because these kinds of behavioral changes can be detected in the multivariate archaeological record. Coastal zones are dynamic and rich environments with abundant, diverse, and predictable foods and other resources. Scholars have been intrigued by the way coastal environments may have supported and even protected humans living in these places from larger ecological changes that detrimentally affected human groups living in inland locations. Yet considerable gaps remain in these records due to changes in sea levels during glacial phases that shifted the locations of many coastlines by tens to hundreds of kilometers. Understanding how hunter-gatherers adapted to coastal zones over long timeframes, and how these groups compared to populations living inland, therefore, provides new insights into the ways that humans used subsistence, social and technological strategies to mediate ecological pressures in dynamic environments. It also gives the scientific community a broader point of reference for understanding human impacts on coastal environments, which can inform 21st century marine and coastal conservation strategies.

South Africa has one of the oldest and richest records of human coastal occupation. This research project focuses on South Africa’s East Coast where very narrow continental shelf has limited coastline movements during glacial periods. This prevented large coastline movements and created stable coastal ecosystems. In one these places, known as Pondoland, rare records of coastal occupation and resource use during the Last Glacial Maximum (ca. 26,000-19,000 years ago) have already been recovered by the P5 Project. These records provide a unique opportunity to study hunter-gatherers living in stable coastal contexts over long time periods and compare evidence of their behaviors to hunter-gatherer groups living inland. The project synergizes researchers from numerous international universities and disciplines to answer complex questions about the evolution of human behavior in a unique and persistent environment along Pondoland’s coastline. Detailed archaeological, zooarchaeological, and paleoenvironmental information from excavations at two coastal archaeological sites will be collected as well as datasets from systematic landscape studies and ethnographic observations of modern plant foods and coastal foraging. The research will generate new evidence to test questions about coastal ecological variability across glacial and interglacial periods and how these changes impacted hunter-gatherer food-choice patterns, social networks, settlement patterns, and technology. Situating these data within the broader southern African paleolandscape will bring renewed focus on hunter-gatherer’s use of coastal and inland resources across glacial and interglacial cycles and it will provide a more nuanced understanding of human evolution and social complexity across broad bio-geographical contexts. The project’s interdisciplinary datasets, therefore, will provide detailed insights into past human behavior, humans’ long-term impacts on coastal ecology, local environmental changes that influenced various biotic communities, and new methods to conserve these resources for future generations.