STORIES STORIES 32
Overview of Klasies River main site
HOT STUFF FROM KLASIES RIVER MAIN SITE Klasies River main site, situated on the picturesque Tsitsikamma coast of the south eastern Cape coast, provides unique insights into the long history of Homo sapiens. The site contains 21 metres of well-preserved hunter-fisher-gatherer archaeological remains dating to between 120 000 and 45 000 and also 23 000 to 4800 years ago. At present the remains of more than 50 humans who lived at this site during this time period have been excavated. The dense shell middens, stone and bone tools and many hearths provide glimpses into the behavioural and cognitive characteristics of our ancient ancestors. This year no excavations took place and the focus has been on consolidation and publishing new data. Analysis of fire related phenomena played an important role in this year’s publications as excavations and microscopic analysis revealed unexpected finds. One example is the reddened and fractured quartzite fragments found at Klasies River from the 2015 season onwards. Reddening and fracturing of rocks are generally associated with the use of stones in cooking or as hearthstones around the fire. However, since neither hearthstones nor hot-rock cooking were previously found in Middle Stone Age contexts, we conducted a series of experiments to understand how these
reddened fractures rocks formed. Silje Evjenth Bentsen explains the experiments on page 36-37. These results were published in the Journal of Field Archaeology in 2019. But what can heated rocks and fire use tell us about the humans staying at Klasies River? We see that there are different types of fire use at the site. Firstly, there are remains of very small fires. Little time was needed to gather firewood or otherwise prepare for these fires, but they would have died down quite quickly and represent short use. Secondly, there are remains of slightly larger fires, which required more wood and preparations and could be used for longer or by more people. Lastly, the reddened quartzite indicates that people had used time to gather quartzite before starting the fires. The quartzite was heated repeatedly to high temperatures and much firewood was required for these fires. These different types of fire use indicate that people used Klasies River in different ways, from short stays that might just represent an afternoon to longer stays of days or perhaps even weeks. We presented these ideas in 2019 in a book chapter in the book “Architectures of Fire: Processes, Space and Agency in Pyrotechnologies”, edited by Dragoş Gheorghiu (Archaeopress).
