Seasonal mobility in the late stone age

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Seasonal mobility in the late stone ageJ. E. Parkington aa Lecturer in the Department of Archaeology, School of African Studies , University of CapeTown ,Published online: 24 Feb 2007.

To cite this article: J. E. Parkington (1972) Seasonal mobility in the late stone age, African Studies, 31:4, 223-244

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SEASONAL MOBILITY IN THE LATE STONE AGE

J. E. PARKINGTON*

INTRODUCTION

Little is known of the prehistory of the western Cape coastal belt. The commentsof colonists and travellers from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries tell ofyellow-skinned hunters and herders with whom they came into contact. Most ofthese records describe the material equipment, food sources, social organizationand magico-religious ideas of the indigenous population, but in tantalizinglyvague terms. Until recently there were no archaeological records to substantiateand expand the historical accounts, but the picture is beginning to change. Ourown research is directed at the understanding of prehistoric living patterns in theWestern Cape from the coast east into the Cape Folded Belt and beyond into theKaroo. This region was chosen in part because it includes a set of clearly differen-tiated vegetation belts with distinct evidence of resource zonation in space and,less obviously, in time. The focus of the research, like that of many prehistorians,is the examination of man-land relations. We wish to know how the prehistoricpopulations used the area and its resources, what the relationship was betweenhunters and herders, what the exploitation strategies were, what precise resourceswere utilized and how, and what effects the resource pattern had on group size,site location and seasonal mobility. Archaeology with an ecological viewpoint isthe study of the inter-relationships of technology, subsistence and environment.

Once the framework of resource utilization in pre-contact times has been re-constructed, it will be interesting to trace it back in time, to see when such apattern was established and what the previous pattern was. Also of interest is thecomparison of the Atlantic coastal belt with the inland plateau or the southernCape coastal belt, where similar investigations are in progress.1 The purpose ofthis paper is to present an interim report on the excavations and surveys ofsites in the research area and, in particular, to illustrate its potential for thereconstruction of resource exploitation patterns and seasonal mobility. So farall the archaeological information refers to hunters, a situation which must soonbe remedied. The discussion has been divided into three sections: the first dealswith the model we have used in interpreting the excavated data; the seconddescribes the zonation of resources in the research area in space and time; thethird presents the preliminary results of excavations in the Cape Folded Belt andon the coast.

* Mr J. E. Parkington is a Lecturer in the Department of Archaeology, School of African Studies,University of Cape Town.

1 Unpublished research by R. G. Klein and R. R. Inskeep.

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224 AFRICAN STUDIES, 31. 4. 1972

THE MODEL

The number of extensive and intensive ethnographic studies of hunter-gatherershas increased enormously in the past decade. So much so that several symposiahave been held on 'band organization', the 'cultural ecology of hunting bands'and 'man the hunter', and the proceedings have appeared in print (Damas,1969a, 1969b; Lee and De Vore, 1968). One of the results of this outburst of ideasand information is that it is now possible to scan hunter-gatherer behaviourpatterns over several continents, in a wide variety of environmental situationswith varying degrees of isolation. One of the points to emerge from hunter-gatherer symposia is the tendency for the underlying structure of groups at thissubsistence level to be similar despite the gross differences of the environmentalcontext. The fact that field-workers with first-hand experience of hunter-gathererscan agree upon characteristics common to quite separate and, on the surface,quite different communities suggests that there may be a 'common structure', aset of rules, flexible but discernible, which govern or pattern groups at this levelof resource technology. If such a structure were found to exist, it would clearlyprovide a useful predictive model in the unravelling of the dynamics of prehistorichunter-gatherers. Moreover, it could be argued that each hunter-gatherer grouptakes on its particular form as a result of the interaction between its 'structure'and the environmental context in which it finds itself. The relationship might bewritten as follows:

I am grateful to Colin Murray of the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cape Town,for his transformation of my verbal point into this diagrammatic form.

Where S is the basic structure, E1( E2, E3 are particular environmental contextsand t1( t2> t3 are the various transformations of S under such conditions. If such amodel is acceptable, it is possible to predict the sort of manifestation at any onetime and place if we can specify (a) the common structure of hunter-gatherersand (b) the particular environmental sieve through which it must pass. Therecent prehistory of the Atlantic coast of the Cape should be amenable to this sortof analysis as conditions have not changed drastically since immediate pre-contacttimes. There have been changes, but many of these can be accounted for withthe help of botanists, zoologists, geomorphologists and geographers.

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SEASONAL MOBILITY IN THE LATE STONE AGE 225

There remains the crucial question of the recognition of the structure of hunter-gatherer society, the central tendency about which observed societies tend to beclustered. Can some of the characteristics of the supposed structure be defined?

(a) Societies which depend on the collection of wild produce for their livingtend to have an impressive knowledge of what is available, where and when.Modern ethnographic reports (see, for example, Lee, 1965) stress the factthat hunters can identify a very large range of animals and plants, eventhough they may utilize only a few regularly as food. Their knowledge ofthe conditions under which these species will flourish and the factorsdetermining seasonal abundance or availability of edible products is equallywell documented.

(b) Armed with this information the hunter-gatherers will tend to maximizetheir utilization of what is available with a variety of strategies, as far as isallowed by their technology. Again Richard Lee's work amongst the !Kungof the Kalahari illustrates how groups plan their annual exploitationstrategy in order to use seasonal or temporary abundances and conservepermanent resources for times when no temporary alternatives are avail-able. The result is a patterned but flexible routine of exploitation designedto extract the maximum energy profit from the set of available resources.

(c) There are several implications of this type of exploitation pattern. Groupsmust be small and mobile; camps must be temporary and placed so as tomaximize the acquisition of food, water and the raw materials necessaryfor tool manufacture and maintenance; property must be restricted to whatis absolutely necessary, though here we should avoid taking a line ofeconomic determinism and admit that there are leisure necessities (musicalinstruments, beads, paints) as well as the equipment necessary for thecollection and preparation of plant and animal foods.

(d) By and large there are two sorts of food collection: the gathering of plantsand the hunting of animals, though some animals such as tortoises, lizards,snails or shellfish are more accurately gathered than hunted. In all hunter-gatherer societies the rule seems to be that women collect plant food andslow or immobile animal food, whilst men hunt mobile animals withoccasional help from the women, for example, as beaters in a collectivedrive. Moreover, in ecosystems where plant foods are common, i.e., inall except high latitude environments, they provide the bulk by weight ofthe consumed food supply. Animal foods may contribute the bulk of theprotein intake and the contribution of plant foods may be consciouslyunderstressed by the group; but it is the collection of food by women, asdistinct from the hunting of it by men, which tides the group over from dayto day. Plant collection may be low status to hunter-gatherers, but itspart in the determination of site occupation and seasonal mobility cannotbe over-emphasized by the archaeologist.

(e) Colin Turnbull (1968) has described the importance of flexibility or 'flux'amongst groups of BaMbuti hunters of the Ituri Forest of the Eastern

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Congo. Since flux seems to be characteristic of many, if not most, hunter-gatherers, it is worth listing some examples of it:

(i) Ephemeral occupation of sites and the constant movement aroundan annual 'beat' have already been mentioned as essential to the fullexploitation of resources.

(ii) Group size and group composition are likewise flexible. Groupsfuse and split up for various reasons, some of them ecological, someof them social, and group size is certainly not a constant throughthe annual cycle. Nor is the composition of local groups laid downby rules of patrilocal residence or patrilineal recruitment. Groupstend to consist of people joined by close ties of kinship or marriage,but the actual membership can vary considerably. Moreover,members of one group may spend a considerable portion of theirtime visiting neighbouring groups amongst whom they have rela-tives. Since local groups are usually exogamous, individuals possessa web of kinship ties with surrounding groups and can thus visitthem temporarily or join them permanently if they so choose,

(iii) The attitude of hunter-gatherer groups toward their territory, thearea in which they tend to exploit, is also flexible. Members of agroup have relatives in some of the neighbouring groups and canthus lay claim to the resources of those territories. Hardly anyoneneed restrict himself to the produce of a single territory, and thusalmost all are insured against failure of food in their own resourcearea. The practice of exogamous marriage ties together neighbouringgroups and ensures an even distribution of resources. Rigid territorialboundaries defended against neighbours would be restrictive andare avoided by the system of kinship which establishes reciprocalrights and obligations between neighbouring territorial groups.

(f) Finally, the myth of the 'precarious existence' of hunter-gatherers has beenexploded. Richard Lee (1969) shows that the !Kung spend only two tothree days per week on food gathering and that this is enough to providethe group with a sufficient calorific and protein intake. In fact, surveys ofnutritional standards amongst hunters of the Kalahari and amongst theHadza of Tanzania suggest that hunters are often more healthy than theirherding or agriculturalist neighbours (see Lee and De Vore, 1968, p. 223).Their intimate knowledge of wild products provides hunters with a seriesof alternative strategies and thus insures against the failure of a particularfood resource.

Further analysis might reveal more details of the postulated common structure,but perhaps enough has 'been said to sketch in some regularities of the man-landrelations. Thus it ought to be possible to make some predictions about the hunter-gatherers of the Atlantic coast of the Western Cape in the times immediatelybefore contact with the Europeans. We would expect that th'e hunters had anintimate knowledge of the edible plant foods, where to collect them and when theybecame available, and we would imagine^that trje women made such collections.

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It could be supposed that they moved constantly from site to site, not aimlessly,but on a regular beat designed to provide a varied diet and to exploit the resourcesof a territory. Territories would not have been rigidly denned nor defended, butprobably included a range of different ecosystems thus ensuring a variety of food-stuffs and a spread throughout the year. It could be predicted that the bulkof the diet was collected and that meat was an important aspect of the diet butby no means a staple. Stimulus to move on would come from a scarcity of plantfoods rather than hunted meat. In order to observe how this theoretical structureis transformed into a particular behavioural pattern, it is necessary to look at theenvironmental context which effected the transformation.

THE FRAMEWORKThe pattern of resource exploitation will be determined at least in part by thezonation of resources in space and their availability through time, that is, through-out the annual cycle. The more resources tend to be limited to particular localitiesor seasons, the more constraints will be imposed on the system of exploitationand the more predictable will be the annual 'beat'.

Figures 1 and 2 illustrate the geographical position and vegetation belts of theresearch area, and sites excavated or due to be excavated are marked.

For the moment attention is directed toward the area north of the mouth of theBerg River and south of the bend near the mouth of the Olifants River. Sitesinvestigated range from those on the coast to those in the inland margins of theCape Fynbos vegetation, though sites further east in the Karoo areas will beincluded at a later stage. Figure 2 illustrates some 22 500 square kilometres anda small number of prominent features. Three vegetation belts are indicated: aband of strandveld in the west, up to 30 km across, forming a sandy barrierbetween the coastline and the mountains; the fynbos or machia of the sandstonemountains; and the various types of karoid vegetation which occupy the inlandregions (for details see Acocks, 1953). The only major river system is that of theOlifants and its tributary the Doom, which provide fresh water throughout theyear. Smaller streams and springs are common in the mountains, and althoughwater is more available in the wet winter, these areas probably never fail to offerfresh water. In the strandveld and the Karoo, however, occupation in the driermonths is more severely restricted to a few springs and watercourses. Rainfallmeans vary considerably from over 600 mm in the higher parts of the inlandmountain belt to less than 100 mm in parts of the Karoo and strandveld. Despitethis variation in amount, the area is uniform in that between 60 and 90 per centof all rain falls in the winter months, May to October. Figure 3 illustrates a topo-graphical section from Elands Bay in the west to the Karoo and the valley of theDoom River in the east.At the risk of oversimplifying the variation in topography, rainfall, flora, fauna,basal geology and pasture, perhaps the following resource zonation is in order:

(a) CoastlineThe Atlantic coast offers a set of resources not available further east, asource of foods including fish, molluscs, rock lobsters, seals, sea birds andseaweeds, and perhaps other marine elements. Thinking in terms of site

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Figure 1

catchment (Vita-Finzi and Higgs, 1970), it may well be asked whetherspecific spots along the coast might not have been favoured because oftheir atypical situation. The fact is that long stretches of the coast aresandy beaches, but occasionally there are rocky spurs, sometimes at themouths of estuaries or rivers. These latter situations would appear toprovide the right set of environmental conditions for seals, rock lobsters,sea birds, fish, molluscs and a range of estuarine animals of obvious economicimportance to prehistoric hunter-gatherers. In accordance with the general-ized predictions about hunter-gatherers, it might be predicted that pre-historic man would have exploited these resources and that to do so besthe would have chosen the sort of situation described above for the locationof his sites.

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OLIFANTS . 8 * •IVER . . .

(b)

Figure 2

Coastal PlainThe immediate hinterland of the coastal strip consists of a sandy plainbroken by occasional low koppies never reaching altitudes of over 200metres. The sour sandy soil supports a succulent vegetation but is tooporous to maintain surface waters. Fresh water is only available along thecourses of streams draining from the mountains in the east and thencrossing the plain en route to the Atlantic. Game such as tortoise, rock rabbit

SOOOft

31 Surface Geology;1 Rainfall:1 Vegetation:

1 Surface Water:1 Food Resources:

Elands

Bay

| 3 0 km SEA " COASTAL*PLAIN

Olifants

^ River - ^^—.^ ^^^

OUFANTS RIVER RIVER CEDARBEROMOUNTAINS VALLEYS

sandstone outcrops Quaternary sands sandstone folds< 300mm < 300mmstrandvcld slrandveldlimited almost none

marine game, plant

300 mm -•• 1600 mm

fynbos. sourvcldalways sufficientjame. fish, plant

Doom

_ River

H^eeaeiM—M—MHiINLAND PLATEAU

sandstone - » shales

300 m m - * < 100mmkarroo, swcctvetdonly in winteroame. plant

Figure 3

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or dassie, small buck such as steenbok or grysbok, dune mole, ostrich and,in the past, larger game would have been available as well as a supply offruits, berries and corms when in season. In addition, this coastal plainharbours several outcrops of silcrete, a stone raw material used by theprehistoric occupants. Trees are rare and confined to the watercourses.

Again in terms of the predictive model, it would seem logical to postulatethat hunter-gatherers exploiting both coast and mountains would havecrossed the coastal plain along the watercouiaes. The supply of fresh waterand wood would have enabled the groups to exploit the small game andvegetable products of the strandveld as they made their way across theplain.

(c) The Cape Folded BeltThe mountain ridges of the research area form the northern arm of the CapeFolded Belt. The high winter rainfall and sandstone bedrock combine toproduce sour, poorly developed soils and a very rich flora dominated byshrubs but with arboreal species along the watercourses and an arborealfacies with the cypress, Widdringtonia, in the higher altitudes. Suchvegetation produces a large range of edible plant produce, upon whichbaboons, for example, depend. In prehistoric times there would have been arelatively high ungulate biomass, a conclusion supported both by theaccounts of early travellers and by the range of animals depicted in therock paintings of the area. The hunting of a wide variety of game wouldhave been supplemented by the catching of freshwater fish in the riverswhich dissect the mountain belt. Stone raw materials such as quartzite,quartz, ochre and small jasper or chalcedony pebbles from the sandstonewould have been available, plus a range of utilizable reeds, woods, grasses,leaves and seeds. Such a rich set of environmental resources could havesupported prehistoric groups through much of the year and camps mightwell have been situated so as to take best advantage of the food, waterand raw material resources.

(d) The Doom KarooMean annual rainfall grades down from over 600 mm in the higher parts ofthe Cape Folded Belt to just on 100 mm at the Doom River, whilst eastof the Doom the sandstone is replaced by Dwyka shales and tillite support-ing a succulent vegetation dominated by various genera of xerophyticmesembryanthema. The dry lowland between the Cape Folded Belt andthe Roggeveld escarpment to the east (not shown on Figure 2, but dis-cernible on Figure 1) is drained by the Doom and its major tributary, theTanqua. Tanqua is in fact another form of the word Sonqua or Sanquaand means literally, people of the aromatic bushes; the hunters as charac-terized by the herders. This part of the Karoo goes under various names,

' but will here be referred to as the Doom Karoo since this river is the mostprominent unifying phenomenon.2

* I am grateful to L. H. Impey of the Geography Department of the University of Cape Town fordiscussions on the utilization of the Doom Karoo area.

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P. J. van der Merwe (1945) has documented the trekking of sheep farm-ers between the Doom Karoo and the mountains to the west, from thebeginnings of European settlement to the present day. It is an annual trekdesigned to utilize the rich pastures of the Karoo from the earliest rains ofwinter, in May, to the beginnings of spring in September, when the veld isburnt brown by the sun. Lambing takes place in July in the Karoo, andsince both ewe and lamb can graze on the lime-rich soils of the Dwykashales, the sheep develop strong bones early in life. In addition, the highermountainous pastures to the west are cold and damp in the winter months,whereas the Karoo days are mild and warm. Thus the trek is a farmingstrategy designed to maximize the temporary veld potential of the Karooin winter and conserve the summer veld in the mountains. In discussion,Professor R. C. Bigalke of the Department of Nature Conservation atStellenbosch University has suggested that a similar migration might haveoccurred amongst the larger and more gregarious wild herbivores such as thespringbok and the eland, and the European farmers may well have learntthe strategy from indigenous herders. There is ample evidence that theDoom Karoo was occupied by small groups of hunter-gatherers, but as yetit is not possible to say whether these were the same populations as thosewhose traces are found further west in the mountains. The value of thewinter grazing of the Karoo as an alternative to that of the mountainssuggests that these areas may have formed complementary ecozonesexploited by the same groups at different seasons. It remains to be seenwhether such a system of utilization can be demonstrated in the archaeolo-gical record.

Plant and animal foods are not uniformly available throughout the year,although the temporal boundaries are perhaps not as clear as the spatial ones.Plant foods can be divided into the fruits, berries and drupes of a variety ofshrubs, and rootstocks such as the tubers, corms and roots of various genera.From the references quoted by C. A. Smith (1966), it seems that the most importantedible fruits are those of Carpobrotus edulis (the wild fig), various species of thegenus Euclea, Brabeium stellatifolium (wild almond), several species of Rhus,Rhoicissus digitata (known as bushman's grape), Mundia spinosa (skilpadbessiesor tortoise berries), Chrysanthemoides and Maurocenia frangularia (hottentot'scherry). With the exception of this last, all of the species quoted flower in thespring or early summer between late August and late October and all produceripe berries during the summer. Fruits of any sort were and are much less commonduring the cold wet winter months between May and October.

The list of utilized edible rootstocks includes various corms (of the generaMoraea, Gladiolus, Watsonia and Babiana), tubers (notably two species of Pelar-gonium and Dioscorea elephantipes, Chamarea capensis and Annesorrhiza) and therhizomes of the arum lily, Zantedeschia aethiopica. Whilst the plants are in flowerthe corms and tubers are small and hardly worth collecting, but after seedingthey are large and remain so until the new growth season begins to draw uponthe underground store of starch. The corm-bearing Iridaceae all flower in the springbetween August and October, and the corms reach maximum size in the early

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summer. Winter is the growing season during which the corms shrivel up consider-ably to a fraction of their maximum size. The tuberous species flower later, inthe early summer, but also shrink in the later winter, whilst the rhizomes of thearum lily are biggest in summer.3

Thus the over-all picture is one of an abundance of fruits and berries in summercombined with maximum growth in corms and tubers, compared to a dearth offruits in winter combined with shrivelled and dried out rootstocks. It is inter-esting to note the seasonal variations in baboon diet since they too rely on arange of fruits and corms, in many cases the same as those eaten by hunter-gatherers. Hall (1962) has tabulated the months of the year during which specificstaple foods were eaten by baboons in the Cape Point Nature Reserve, south ofCape Town. His impression was that fruits such as Carpobrotus edulis, and cormssuch as those of Watsonia, formed a major part of the summer diet, but were absentor least available during the winter. It was exotic Acacia seeds that maintainedthe baboon populations through the mid-winter dearth of plant foods.

Animal foods are of course available throughout the year, since most speciesare small, non-migratory forms. However, the existence of restricted parturitionperiods amongst some species may mean that at particular times of the year itwas advisable to turn to the exploitation of these species. Dassies, for example,are born between late September and early November, so that juveniles are avail-able through the summer months. Seals, on the other hand, pup during a veryrestricted period, usually about three weeks, from mid-November to early Decem-ber. Shellfish such as limpets, mussels, whelks and winkles can be found on therocks along the coasts throughout the year, but a phenomenon known as 'red tide'makes certain molluscs, the mussels, poisonous during certain times of the year.Grindley and Nel (1970) have reported that sightings of red tides at Elands Bayoccur in the early summer, about December. Experiments on affected musselssuggest that the toxic effects may last up to four or five months, during which timeit can be fatal to eat the mussels. Following the prediction that prehistoric hunter-gatherers would have been aware of the possibilities and problems of food collec-tion, it may be assumed that the collection of molluscs and especially musselswould have been in the 'safe' period during the winter months.

Investigations as to the seasonal movements and spawning cycles of marinefishes are still in their preliminary stages. However, perhaps the most cautiousstatement would be that some fishes are available in particular environments(sandy stretches, rocky spurs, vlei mouths) throughout the year, whereas othershave more marked seasons in which they appear and may be caught. Thus hot-tentots, Pachymetopon spp, and various genera of klipvis may be caught off rocksthroughout the year along the Atlantic coast, whereas the galjoen, Coracinuscapensis, the elf, Pomatomus saltator, the kabeljou, Johnius hololepidotus, and theyellowtail, Seriola lalandii, can be caught only during more or less restrictedperiods. The existence of spawning runs amongst the freshwater fish of theOlifants River system would also be worth investigation, since they might haveinfluenced the movements of hunter-gatherers to some extent.

• I would like to thank Miss E. Esterhuyzen and Mr P. Goldblatt of the Bolus Herbarium, Universityof Cape Town, for discussion on these points.

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Perhaps there is now enough information about the resource background toattempt to translate the generalized predictions above into specific statementsabout how prehistoric hunter-gatherers could have exploited the environment ofthe Atlantic coast and the inland areas to the east.

It could be assumed that the prehistoric population knew of and exploited,unless they chose not to, all the edible products of the area and that this wouldhave meant a mobile, flexible approach to settlement. The women would havecollected a range of fruits, berries, conns and tubers, and the men would havehunted. During the winter months collectable plant foodstuffs would have beenat a minimum, with few fruits available and corms at their smallest. At this timeit might have been necessary for the women to seek alternative collectable itemsto keep the group alive from day to day in between successful hunts by the men-folk. Such an alternative source is represented by the shellfish on the coast, butnote that they are an alternative in that they are collectable; they are in nosense a replacement for the nutritional contribution of the plant foods. The shell-fish can be harvested in winter without fear of toxic effects, and thus could havebeen a solution to the winter dearth of plant produce. It might be expected, how-ever, that this could only have been a temporary solution since a long-termreplacement of plant foods by molluscs would have produced nutritional im-balance in prehistoric hunter-gatherers. This, according to the generalized pre-dictions, would not have tended to happen. Thus inland hunters may be envisagedas solving a temporary problem and at the same time adding variety to their dietand meaning to their movements by moving down to the coast for a short while,probably during winter, to, exploit coastal resources. An alternative, that somepopulations were confined to the coasts whilst others were confined to the inlandmountains must also be examined. Whether populations using the coast and theinland mountains also moved east into the Karoo regions, is not known. TheDoom River and its tributary, the Tanqua, drain a large part of the Dwykatillite regions of the Karoo and would therefore provide sources of siliceous stonesuitable for artefact manufacture. Moreover, for two hundred years farmers havepractised a form of transhumance between the sourveld of the mountains and thesweetveld of the Karoo. It is possible, though as yet not fully investigated, thatgame moved seasonally between these areas and induced a similar movement inthe hunters. In overview, it seems that the fynbos was optimal for summeroccupation, whilst both the strandveld and the Karoo were better watered duringthe winter months. It is necessary to turn to the historical record, provided byearly travellers, and the results of excavations in order to test these predictionsagainst 'the facts'.

HISTORICAL INFORMATIONAboriginal life in Table Bay was altered from at least as early as the beginningof the seventeenth century, when fairly regular visits by European vessels beganto disrupt the pre-existing patterns of land utilization and resource exploitation.However, when the colonists began to send out parties of explorers to the northand east, they came upon groups of hunters and gatherers whose lives had notessentially been affected by European contacts. These hunters were known col-

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234 ' AFRICAN STUDIES. 31.4. 1972

lectively to the herders as Sonqua or San, and we have a considerable amount ofinformation on their material culture, economic activities and social organization,many details of which they shared with the herders. I am not qualified, nor have Iattempted, to comb the reports of early travellers in order to compile a dossieron the hunter-gatherers of the Western Cape, though such a compilation would bemost useful to anthropologists, historians and archaeologists alike. In the absenceof such documentation, it is possible only to extract a selected sample of recordedinformation as illustrative of the prehistoric occupation pattern. (First-handaccounts are available in V.R.S., 1954; Waterhouse, 1932; Kolb, 1731; andMoodie, 1838-41; whilst summaries appear in Schapera, 1930, and Stow, 1905.)

It is recorded that the non-herding as well as the herding peoples of the Capesubsisted on a diet dominated by 'roots' or 'uintjies' which the women went out tocollect every day. These 'roots' probably included a wide range of species, para-mount among which were members of the iris family, the corms of which were dugup with the aid of a digging stick, pounded and made into cakes, roasted and eaten.These 'roots', along with fruits, locusts, honey and caterpillars certainly providedthe staple foods of hunter-gatherers and were supplemented by animal foods someof which were actively hunted by the menfolk. Slow game such as tortoises andreptiles may well have been collected by the women whilst collecting veld food,but dassies and a variety of small herbivores and carnivores, hares and porcupineswere actively sought and captured by the men, although perhaps not on a dailybasis. A party of early explorers was given honey and dried fish by small groupsof hunters (V.R.S., 1954, p. 300), and on one occasion (V.R.S./ 1954, p. 315),having frightened some hunters into dropping their equipment, the same travellersdiscovered honey and several roasted dassies in small leather bags. Thus therecan be no doubt that small groups of hunters subsisted in the inland regions on adiet of vegetable and animal foods supplemented by honey.

Equally well documented is the appearance of indigenous people at the coastin order to exploit the marine resources. It is recorded in the journal of VanRiebeeck (V.R.S., 1954; p. 176) that parties of cattle-owning Khoi herders visitedrocky spurs in the vicinity of Saldanha Bay in order to club young seals. Theexploitation of seals and other marine resources by hunters and herders has ledto the coining of the phrase 'strandlopers' to cover groups whose subsistence wassupposed to be based solely on 'walking the beaches'. The utilization of marineresources was a strategy resorted to by both hunters and herders (as is clear fromV.R.S., 1954), but it is unlikely that groups of indigenous people made a livingsolely in this way.

None of the early travellers record the movements of hunters between themountains and the coast, though there are plenty of descriptions of the mobilityof the herders in their endless search for pasture. It would be worth scrutinizingthe literature for contacts between travellers and hunters and recording preciselywhere, when and under what circumstances each meeting took place. In this wayit might be possible to suggest, though somewhat tentatively, how the popula-tions of hunter-gatherers moved about the region. Such records might also reveala fluctuating group size amongst the hunters, although the pre-contact patternsmay have become disrupted fairly quickly, especially since European hunters,

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SEASONAL MOBILITY IN THE LATE STONE AGE 235 •

and later on farmers, penetrated the inland areas quite soon after initial contactand before adequate observation had occurred. One observation of Van der Stel's(Waterhouse, 1932) might be worth repeating here. On his return from the copperdeposits of Namaqualand during the summer of 1685-86, he dispatched a smallparty of men to follow the coastline south from the mouth of the Olifants Riverto the present Elands Bay. They failed to contact a single group of hunters orherders along this 75-kilometre stretch, despite the fact that on the northwardjourney hunters had been sighted and contacted inland at the Berg River andnorth of the confluence of the Doom and the Olifants. By co-ordinating reportssuch as this it may be possible to sketch in roughly the population movementsof hunters and herders.

ARCHAEOLOGICAL INFORMATIONSome information is now available on occupation patterns from archaeologicalinvestigations (see for example Parkington and Poggenpoel, 1971). So far onlyDe Hangen, in the mountains, and Elands Bay, on the coast, have been analysedin detail, and so comments will be restricted to the interpretation of data fromthese sites.

(a) De Hangen (marked 1 in Figure 2)Excavations at De Hangen produced a wide range of plant products and animal

foods utilized by prehistoric man, plus a good deal of information on the utiliza-tion of non-food resources. The shallow deposits of the cave illustrated how grasseswere brought in and laid down, as bedding, around three sides of a central ashdeposit, and plant remains were well preserved throughout. Four of the sixradiocarbon dates from these deposits fall between 350 and 48014C years before thepresent, and suggest that the food debris dates from the fourteenth or fifteenthcenturies A.D. Edible plant foods include a variety of seeds and fruits, tubers,corms and conn casings, most common among which are traces of various generafrom the Iridaceae family, Watsonia, Homeria, Moraea and Babiana. The driedstems of the wild fig, Carpobrotus edulis, the seed cases and flower bases of Proteaand Leucadendron, tuber cases of Pelargonium and the seeds of Euclea, Olea,and Rhus were also common and must have contributed considerably to thevegetable diet. The animal bones included the remains of about fifteen herbivoresof which two-thirds were small buck weighing 12 kg or less when alive. Hares,genets, mongooses, small carnivores, rodents and a porcupine were collectedbut in small numbers, whereas easily the two most common animals were thetortoise, represented by 313 individuals, and the dassie or rock rabbit, representedby over 90 individuals (in Parkington and Poggenpoel, 1971, preliminary countsindicated only 64, but this figure should now be replaced by the present estimate).In addition there were two bone fragments identified as belonging to freshwaterfish and fragmentary or whole examples of several genera of marine molluscs.The presence of what looks like domestic cattle and domestic sheep/goat suggestthat the herders occasionally lost stock to the hunters, as one might expect.(The herders referred to some of the hunters as Abiqua which meant, robber men.)

Several aspects of the De Hangen assemblage suggest contact with the Atlanticcoast:

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1. The pottery from De Hangen is identical in form, manufacture and decora-tion to the large collection of coastal pottery assembled and published byJalmar Rudner (1968) and referred to by him as 'strandloper'.

2. The marine molluscs in the De Hangen deposits could have been tradedfrom the coast for translation into implements and ornaments, but it seemsmore likely that the De Hangen community themselves travelled to thecoast, 60 km as the crow flies, as part of their annual beat. Marine molluscanshells were used as scoops or spoons and were made into beads and pend-ants, and are known from most, if not all, deposits investigated from thenorthern arm of the Cape Folded Belt. They appear at Sites 1, 2, 5, 7 and 8in Figure 2.

3. Something like one-fifth of the small flake tools from De Hangen weremanufactured from silcrete, a form of surface quartzite mapped as out-cropping at various localities in the Malmesbury, Clanwilliam and Van-rhynsdorp districts, mostly between the Olifants River and the coast.The origins of the outcrops are not well known, but the raw materialprobably occurs as rafts 'floating' within the Quaternary sands of thestrandveld. Preliminary sorting of the stone implements from Site 4 inFigure 2 indicates that the frequency of silcrete worked pieces is higherhere than at any of the sites further east, as one might expect if the silcreteis more or less restricted to the strandveld areas.

4. Although the paintings at De Hangen include only animals, human figuresand some arrangements of dots and strokes, it is perhaps worth mentioningthe evidence for coastal contact in the rock art of the Cape Folded Belt.Townley Johnson (1960) has recorded several motifs from the Cape FoldedBelt which he interprets as ships. Whilst most would agree now that thereare fewer demonstrable ships in prehistoric contexts, the 'galleon' fromjust west of the headwaters of the Olifants River and the ships of the GydoPass district are entirely acceptable. Whilst marine shells may have beentraded inland from the coast, it must be almost inarguable that paintingsof ocean-going ships 120 km from the sea were painted by people whothemselves visited the coast.

In addition to these indicators of coastal contacts, there were hints in theDe Hangen deposits of the season of occupation. These were:

1. The age distribution of dassie individuals included a large percentage ofjuveniles. In the south-western Cape dassies are born during a short periodof spring, from late September through to early November, and somethingis known of the dates at which deciduous teeth are lost and replaced bypermanent teeth (Parkington and Poggenpoel, 1971, p. 29). Unfortunatelythis information is not yet as precise as it needs to be to allow any definitestatements about dassie aging and therefore dates of death. However,even allowing for this imprecision, it is clear that the vast majority ofdassies at De Hangen could have been killed in the six or seven monthsfollowing birth, that is, from spring to the end of summer.

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2. The staples of the De Hangen community clearly included the fruits ofvarious shrubs and the conns of Iridaceae. It has already been pointed outthat, although some fruits may be harvested throughout most of the yearand conns are always present, though in variable size and with variablevisibility, there is a distinct fluctuation in seasonal availability. From thegrowth patterns of the plants themselves, and from the habits of baboonswhich still eat them, it seems that these foods are more available in thesummer months than during the winter.

3. The bedding which the occupants of De Hangen gathered included thegrasses Ehrharta and Pennesetum, the rush Cyperus or Mariscus and thegenus Helichrysum, a member of the Compositae family. The inflorescencesof all four genera were recovered, some of them in very large numbers, frombedding samples from De Hangen. Since these plants flower in this part ofthe Cape Folded Belt during late spring or summer, from October to March,it seems obvious that the bedding was gathered at some time during thesummer months.

These lines of argument would appear to establish beyond reasonable doubtthat De Hangen was occupied during the summer months. The question arises:how is it possible to demonstrate that the site was not occupied during the winter?Grasses without inflorescences may have been gathered during the winter, andat this time food sources other than young dassies and summer fruits may havebeen tapped. Perhaps the question can be approached by demonstrating thatneighbouring complementary resource zones were occupied during the winter, andpostulating that it was the De Hangen community which occupied them. Beforeleaving the Folded Belt, it should be mentioned that the situation at De Hangenis repeated at other sites in the Olifants River area and further east in the highermountain chain. Here too the deposits are littered with tortoise bones, dassiebones, fragmentary grasses brought in as bedding and the corm casings of Iridaceae.In fact, the Sites marked 7 and 8 on Figure 2 are almost carbon copies, as far as onecan see from surface disturbances, of De Hangen.(b) Elands Bay Cave (marked 3 on Figure 2)

Excavations in the cave at Cape Deseada, Elands Bay, during November andDecember 1970 have not yet been published. What follows is a brief summary ofsome of the data relevant to an understanding of seasonal mobility in immediatepre-contact times. So far one-quarter of the deposits covering parts of the last11 000 years has been excavated, whilst the deposits below this date have notyet been investigated. The deposits consist largely of shell midden but includeseveral levels regarded as living floors, since in them the shells and bones areincorporated in a fine sandy, ashy matrix and are accompanied by wads of well-preserved estuarine grasses, probably brought in as bedding. Since excavatedvolumes of individual strata are small, it has been necessary to pool the counts ofthe animal species in some cases in order to have samples of statistically meaning-ful sizes. This is unfortunate, and in future it is hoped to be able to compare DeHangen with only those sediments of Elands Bay which are contemporary.

Without going into detail about the excavations and the stratigraphy, thereare several aspects of the biological remains from Elands Bay which contrast

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markedly with those of De Hangen and which may be interpreted in terms ofresource exploitation and season of occupation. These are:

1. The list of animal resources exploited from the cave is considerably longerthan that of De Hangen and the relative importance of some items wouldappear to differ. Terrestrial forms include the tortoise (uncounted as yet,but represented by over a thousand individuals), small buck such as theduiker and the steenbok or grysbok (64 individuals), dune moles (31),dassies (25), larger herbivores (14 including alcelophines, eland and buffalo),carnivores (19 ranging from a single genet to a single leopard), hedgehog(8), and hare (7). Marine animal foods consist of many thousands of molluscs(of which between 70 per cent and 95 per cent comprise black mussels orthe various species of limpet), cormorants (144), other sea birds (38,mostly gannet and penguin), fish (over 400 individuals mostly white

. steenbras, kabeljou and white stompnose), rock lobster (315) and seals (45).A preponderance of tortoises seems to be characteristic of sites in theWestern Cape, but dassies were clearly less important on coastal sites thanin the caves of the mountain belt. Excluding molluscs, the ratio of re-cognizable marine individuals to terrestrial individuals varies a little fromlevel to level between 5 and 15:1.

It is significant that within 3 kilometres of the cave there are severalhundred metres of intertidal rocks,.upon which large colonies of limpetsand mussels are to be found. Sea birds congregate on these rocks in con-siderable numbers and, before large-scale disturbance began after Europeancontact, there may well have been breeding colonies of seals and sea birdson one of these rocky shelves. A further factor in the choice of Cape Deseadafor prehistoric occupation is. the fact that it stands at the mouth of afreshwater vlei some 25 kilometres long and several hundred metres widenear the mouth. Fresh water, a range of estuarine foods, and the attractionof the vlei to terrestrial game would have enhanced the potential of thearea considerably. Finally, the presence of four rock lobster factories atthe point is an indication of the enormous lobster community whichlives among the kelp beds from low spring tide level down to a depth ofseveral metres. In the past, before commercial exploitation began, it ispossible that rock lobsters were even more common and probably ex-tended further up the shoreline.

2. The dassie bones from Elands Bay Cave are not only less common inrelation to, say, small buck, than at De Hangen (roughly 1:2 as distinctfrom 10:1), they also seem to represent a different size and age range. Only25 individual dassies are recognizable in the sample from the uppermostdeposits so far analysed, and no fewer than 13 of these are fully adult,whilst only two have the new-born dentition of three or four lower cheek-teeth, so common at De Hangen. Dassies on the whole were less frequentlytaken and there was no large-scale collection of very immature specimensas there was in the mountains.

3. In the top 30 cm of deposit, which is estimated to cover very roughly the

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last thousand years, the black mussel, Choromytilus tneridionalis, repre-sents fully a half of the recognizable molluscs. This mussel, being a filterfeeder, becomes highly toxic during periods of red tide when millions oftiny marine organisms drift into the shore and are consumed by the mussels.Despite this, it was eaten in very large numbers by the prehistoric popula-tion. Red tides may be observed from the Elands Bay Cave and appear aslarge maroon slicks on the surface of the ocean. Since they poison themolluscs for periods of up to four months, it would seem unlikely thatexploiters would chance eating mussels during periods when sightings tendto occur. Investigations suggest that the poisoning of mussels rarely, ifever, occurs during the winter months.

4. In the uppermost deposits of the Elands Bay Cave the survival of organicremains is pretty good. In particular there are lots of twigs, some grass,some kelp (seaweed which anchors to the shore from the low spring tidelevel downward) and estuarine grasses in large quantities. However,despite a careful search, these deposits have yielded no more than a handfulof corm tunics, corm bases or seeds, all of which are obviously wellrepresented in the inland deposits, even from surface indicationsin undisturbed caves. It seems therefore that vegetable foods werecollected but that they were not nearly so important on the coast as in themountains. It may well be that the women spent their time collectingmolluscs rather than rootstocks, although not exclusively. The possibilitythat seaweeds were systematically collected and eaten is still beinginvestigated.

5. One of the most interesting points to emerge during the excavation of theElands Bay Cave deposits was the uniform size of the seal bones beinguncovered. Analysis of the seal bones resulted in counts of 61 femora andlesser numbers of the other long bones, with surprisingly little variabilityin over-all size. None of the long bones had fused epiphyses and none of the

• cheekteeth had the 'bloated' roots characteristic of adult seals. It seemedworthwhile to embark upon a study of seal habits, the growth rates ofseals and the measurement of seal bones of known ages, especially since thegenus represented (Arctocephalus pusillus, the Cape Fur Seal) has a re-stricted pupping period from mid-November to mid-December. R. W. Randof the Division of Sea Fisheries has published (Rand, 1949a, 1949b) detailsof the annual cycle amongst seals, and many of his aged animals have beenpresented to the South African Museum in Cape Town.4 Unfortunatelyonly the skulls and mandibles of the seals studied by Rand are housed in themuseum, so that measurements had to be confined to mandibles, re-presented by a small sample of 16 unbroken specimens from the ElandsBay Cave. Larger samples of mandibles will be obtained from individuallayers in the summer of 1971-72, and in any case it seems logical to supposethat the sample of 16 mandibles is essentially the same as the sample of 61

4 Brett Hendey of the South African Museum, Cape Town, kindly made these collections availableand provided considerable assistance in their interpretation. • •

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MANDIBLE t maltLENGTH • t tmal imm130—

120

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YEARLINGS

weaning: « •

BLACK PUPS «9

birth * *o

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SECOND YEARS

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j i . 1 1 EUNDSM . BAYf I . . CAVE

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N D J F M A M J J A S O N D J F H A

SUMMER AUTUMN WINTER SPRING SUMMER AUTUMN

COMPARISON OF RECENT AND PREHISTORIC SEALS

Figure 4

femora and that the uniformity of mandible lengths in fact applies to alarger population than the 16 which have survived unbroken. In Figure 4the mandible lengths of seals in' the South African Museum have beenplotted against the date of death as recorded by Rand. The mandiblelength was measured from the condyle of the ramus to the anterior marginof the first cheektooth (in prehistoric specimens the canine and chin portionsare weak and do not tend to survive intact) along the outer side of themandible.

In addition to these measurements, some account has been taken ofthe annual cycle of the seals, since this determines the sizes and ages ofseals available at particular times during the year. Pups are born from aboutmid-November through to mid-December and for four months maintaintheir black silky coats, being known as 'black pups' for this period. By Maythey have lost all their deciduous teeth, the black coat has been replacedby an olive grey one and they are beginning to spend more of their time atsea. However, they still return to the rookery every night and continue tobe fed by the cows who return every few days to suckle their young. ByAugust or September the yearlings, as Rand terms them, begin to beweaned, since the cows, impregnated within a week of parturition, must nowsupport a rapidly growing foetus. At this stage the yearlings begin to spendmore and more time at sea feeding themselves, until by late October therookeries are almost deserted as seals return only periodically. From theend of October the breeding bulls return to the rookery, set up territorialbases and attract a harem of cows returning to give birth. The cycle thenrepeats itself, since the gestation period is about 361 days.

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Fully adult seals visit the rookery throughout the year sporadicallyand can thus be caught at any time, if they can be approached and dis-patched. However, there is a distinct seasonal variation in the sorts ofjuveniles and infants available through the year. In the summer monthsthere are black pups, more or less immobile bundles of meat and blubber,and second years, animals who have recently passed their first year but whostill spend much of their time at the rookery. During the winter months thevisits by older seals are less frequent and the animals available are theyearlings, small seals a metre or so long which achieve maximum size justbefore they are weaned in late winter or early spring. Figure 4 illustratesthe mandible lengths of seals from Elands Bay Cave. Quite clearly thereare no black pups and no second years, whilst all of the seals representedcould fairly be described as yearlings in Rand's classification. It is difficultto believe that the prehistoric hunters would not have killed and eaten thehelpless black pups had they been available.

Two possible explanations suggest themselves. The first is that theprehistoric populations visited the coast for only a short time during thewinter or early spring months and caught the most helpless animals theycould find, that is, the yearlings. It might be expected that this visit co-incided with the maximum blubber and meat/minimum mobility period,since a tendency to maximize exploitation amongst such hunter-gathererpopulations has been postulated. The yearling is three times or more theweight of the black pup and no more able to defend itself. However, assum-ing that the seals did not pup on land, but on islands out to sea, anotherexplanation might be in order. During the late winter yearlings are weanedand forced to spend more time at sea catching food. There is undoubtedlya very high mortality rate amongst immature seals battling against therough seas of the Atlantic winter and many are washed ashore dead orcompletely exhausted at this time of year. The frequency of yearlings maymerely reflect a period of high mortality amongst seals at sea, utilized bya coastal population.

As a partial solution to this problem, it is worth quoting the commentsof a French sea captain, himself collecting seal skins, to the Dutch inOctober, 1653 (V.R.S., 1954, p. 176). He had been at Saldanha Bay throughthe winter and "had seen Saldanhas [herders] at a certain point jutting intothe sea, where they were killing many seals [of which there were thousands]for food etc." It seems likely (1) that seals were breeding on land as well ason islands, and (2) that indigenous peoples (in this case herders) activelykilled them rather than collected isolated specimens washed up on theshore. A compromise interpretation might be that the annual visit byhunters was timed to coincide with the period when quantities of ex-hausted yearlings were known to be washed ashore.

It certainly is not possible to be definite about when the Elands Bay Cave wasdeserted, but all the evidence suggests that it was occupied during some part ofthe winter or early' spring. Assembling the evidence from faunal and floral re-

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mains, it seems that, before the cycle was interrupted early in the eighteenthcentury, populations spent only a short while at the coast, during which timemolluscan foods supplemented rootstocks as staples, and a wide variety of marineand terrestrial animal foods were caught.

PROSPECTSThis has been a preliminary attempt to show the possibilities of the analysis offood remains from sites in the Western Cape. Many more sites will have to beexamined before patterns can be established and interpreted. Amongst the mostobvious priorities are the following:

(a) Additional sites must demonstrate that the pictures at De Hangen andElands Bay are not isolated examples but representative of a patternedland use in pre-contact times. The observations must be repeated at othersites in comparable situations.

(b) Sites in contrasting situations must be analysed to fill in the gaps of theover-all beat. It would be interesting to examine sites in the Olifants River,along one of the watercourses which traverse the strandveld, or in thekaroid regions along the Doom River. The concept of an annual migrationfrom mountain to coast and back may well be too simple, and the re-lationship between mountain sourveld and Karoo sweetveld must beinvestigated, as it might represent an exploitation system complete initself.

(c) The concentration on cave sites as distinct from 'open' sites is unhealthyand needs to be rectified. The relationship of open middens to cave middensand the distribution of open middens about natural features such asintertidal rocks, fish traps, river or vlei mouths and sandy beaches is underinvestigation. Inland open sites are difficult to discover, but are historicallydocumented and must be included.

(d) Despite the fact that most historical information describes herders and nothunters, there is still no archaeological record of herders; no herder siteshave been excavated and their niche in the pattern of land use remainssomething of a mystery.

Whilst attempting to fill in these gaps in our knowledge, more generalized andspecific predictions can be generated and tested against the increasing volume ofarchaeological data. Some positions will have to be abandoned, others can bemaintained and strengthened, but ultimately we shall know something of the wayin which indigenous peoples used the land and its resources.

ACOCKS, J. P. H. 1953. Veld Types of South Africa. Pretoria, Government Printer.(S.A. Botanical Survey, Memoir 28)

DAMAS, D. (ed.,) 1969a. Contributions to Anthropology: band societies. Ottawa, Nat.Museums of Canada. (Bulletin No. 228 Anthropological Series)

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DAMAS, D. 1969b. Contributions to Anthropology: ecological essays. Ottawa, Nat.Museums of Canada. (Bulletin No. 230 Anthropological Series)

GRINDLEY, J. R. AND NEL, E. A. 1970. Red water and mussel poisoning at ElandsBay, December 1966. Fish. Bull. S. Afr. 6, 36-55.

HALL, K. R. L. 1962. 1962 Numerical data, maintenance activities and locomotionamong the wild chacma baboon, Papio ursinus. Proc. Zool. Soc. London 139.181-220.

JOHNSON, T. 1960. Rock-paintings of ships. S. Afr. Archaeol. Bull. 15 (59) 111-113.KOLB, P. 1731. The Present State of the Cape of Good Hope. London, Innys.LEE, R. B. 1965. The Subsistence Ecology of the !Kung Bushmen. Berkeley, Uni-

versity of California, Ph.D. thesis.____ 1969. !Kung bushmen subsistence: an input-output analysis. In D.

Damas (ed.) Contributions to Anthropology: ecological essays. Ottawa, Nat.Museums of Canada. (Bulletin No. 230 Anthropological Series)

LEE, R. B. AND DE VORE, I. 1968. Man the Hunter. Chicago, Aldine.MOODIE, D. 1960. The Record, 1838-41. Reprinted Cape Town, Balkema.PARKINGTON, J. E. AND POGGENPOEL, C. 1971. Excavations at De Hangen 1968.

S. Afr. Archaeol. Bull. 26 (101-2) 3-36.RAND, R. W. 1949a. Studies in the Cape Fur Seal, Arctocephalus pusillus, 1. Age

grouping in the female. Guano Islands Administration Progress Report, 1-15.Cape Town, Department of Agriculture.

_____ 1949b. Studies in the Cape Fur Seal, Arctocephalus pusillus, 3. Agegrouping in the male. Guano Islands Administration Progress Report, 1-23.Cape Town, Department of Agriculture.

RUDNER, J. 1968. Strandloper pottery from South and South West Africa.Ann. S. Afr. Museum 49, 441-663.

SCHAPERA, I. 1930. The Khoisan Peoples of South Africa. London, Routledge andKegan Paul.

SMITH, C. A. 1966. Common Names of South African Plants. Pretoria, GovernmentPrinter. (Department of Agricultural Technical Services Botanical SurveyMemoir No. 35)

STOW, G. 1905. The Native Races of South Africa. Reprinted Cape Town, Struik,1964.

TURNBULL, C. M. 1968. The importance of flux in two hunting societies. In R. B.Lee and I. de Vore (eds) Man the Hunter. Chicago, Aldine.

VAN DER MERWE, P. J. 1945. Trek. Cape Town, Nasionale Pers.VAN RIEBEECK SOCIETY. 1954. The Journal of Jan van Riebeeck. Cape Town,

Balkema.VITA-FINZI, C. AND HIGGS, E. S. 1970. Prehistoric economy in the Mount Carmel

area of Palestine. Site catchment analysis. Proc. Prehist. Soc. 36, 1-37.WATERHOUSE, G. 1932. Simon van der Stel's Journal. Dublin, University Press.

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The Fourth Annual Conference on African Linguistics will be held in New YorkCity under the sponsorship of Queens College and the Graduate Center of theCity University of New York in April, 1973.Abstracts of papers for presentation at the Conference are to be submitted byJanuary 1, 1973.Send four copies of each abstract to:

Amy MyersDepartment of LinguisticsQueens College, C.U.N.Y.Flushing, New York 11367

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Documents

Seasonal mobility in the late stone age