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‘Primordialism and the ‘Pleistocene San’ of southern Africa’: final reply

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 July 2016

Justin Pargeter ,
Alex MacKay ,
Peter Mitchell ,
John Shea  and
Brian A. Stewart
Justin Pargeter
Affiliation:
Interdepartmental Doctoral Program in Anthropological Sciences, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794, USA (Email: justin.pargeter@stonybrook.edu) Department of Anthropology and Development Studies, University of Johannesburg, Auckland Park 2006, South Africa
Alex MacKay
Affiliation:
Centre for Archaeological Science, School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Wollongong, Northfields Avenue, Wollongong, NSW 2522, Australia
Peter Mitchell
Affiliation:
School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Private Bag X3, Wits 2050, South Africa School of Archaeology, University of Oxford, 36 Beaumont Street, Oxford OX1 2PG, UK
John Shea
Affiliation:
Anthropology Department, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794, USA
Brian A. Stewart
Affiliation:
Museum of Anthropological Archaeology, University of Michigan, 1109 Geddes Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1079, USA Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, Private Bag X3, Wits 2050, South Africa
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Extract

We thank our colleagues for their insightful comments. The weight of modern evidence is against the notion that contemporary human cultures can be tracked backwards into the Pleistocene (e.g. Lee & DeVore 1976; Kuper 1988; Wilmsen 1989; Solway & Lee 1990; MacEachern 2000). Modern-day hunter-gatherers are not our Stone Age ancestors. Current protestations notwithstanding, the provocative title that d'Errico and colleagues (2012) chose for their paper, ‘Early evidence of San material culture represented by organic artifacts from Border Cave, South Africa’, unambiguously asserts the opposite. Our critique of that paper's content does not question the robusticity of the methods employed at Border Cave (for this, see Evans 2012). Rather, our comments focus on the theoretically flawed search for a specifically ‘San’ “cultural adaptation” (d'Errico et al. 2012: 13214) at any Pleistocene archaeological site.

Type
Debate
Information
Antiquity , Volume 90 , Issue 352 , August 2016 , pp. 1087 - 1089
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd, 2016 

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