A tale from three regions: The archaeology of the Pleistocene/Holocene transition in the Western Cape, the Caledon Valley and the Lesotho highlands, southern Africa

The archaeological and palaeoenvironmental records of the Western Cape, the Caledon Valley and the Lesotho highlands are examined across the Pleistocene/Holocene boundary using data from three key long sequence sites: Elands Bay Cave, Rose Cottage Cave and Sehonghong. The settlement histories of all three regions are highly pulsed, but there is some suggestion that the Western Cape was out of synch with the two other regions, a relationship possibly linked to their different rainfall regimes. In all three regions, however, people used the landscape quite differently in the period reviewed compared to the late Holocene. An increased use of r-selected food resources is most visible at Elands Bay, but in all three regions the early Holocene witnessed a shift toward greater exploitation of smaller, browsing bovids. Increased localization of social alliance networks, suggested by the distributions of non-local items and by patterns of stone raw material usage in the Lesotho highlands/Caledon Valley area, may reflect increasing population densities as environmental productivity rose. The importance is stressed of developing explanations of these phenomena at a range of appropriate spatio-temporal scales and suggestions are made as to where future research may most profitably be directed. (C) 1998 INQUA/Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.