Introduction to the Special Issue-The Middle Stone Age at Pinnacle Point Site 13B, a Coastal Cave near Mossel Bay (Western Cape Province, South Africa)

TY - JOUR

T1 - Introduction to the Special Issue-The Middle Stone Age at Pinnacle Point Site 13B, a Coastal Cave near Mossel Bay (Western Cape Province, South Africa)

AU - Marean, Curtis

N1 - Funding Information: Our prior work at DK1 followed the standard site-centric approach that continues to dominate archaeological research. We discarded that at Pinnacle Point and developed the South African Coast Paleoclimate, Paleoenvironment, Paleoecology, Paleoanthropology Project (SACP4). This built a large team with a transdisciplinary approach to develop an integrated paleoclimatic, paleoenvironmental, and paleoanthropological record for the south coast of South Africa spanning 400 to 30 ka. Funded by a HOMINID NSF grant and the Hyde Family Foundation, the SACP4 team has pushed the envelope in many ways. We have excavated three sites (PP13B, PP9, and PP5-6) with state-of-the-art methods and report on the PP13B work in this special issue. We developed a paleoscape model that allows us to generate precise estimates of the distance to the coastline at any time in the last 420 ka ( Fisher et al., 2010 ), which allows us to contextualize the occupations at Pinnacle Point in new and meaningful ways. I rely on the model heavily in my concluding paper ( Marean, 2010 ). A keystone to the SACP4 approach has been the use of speleothem records to generate long, continuous, and tightly dated paleoclimatic and paleoenvironmental sequences, which heretofore have been lacking in South Africa. We are the first modern human origins project in South Africa to employ this approach. We recently published such a record for the time span 90–53 ka, and it is now the highest resolution record for Africa for the Middle Stone Age ( Bar-Matthews et al., 2010 ). It provides us with an unprecedented understanding of changes in rainfall and vegetation. Importantly, this transdisciplinary work has occurred synchronously with the other research, resulting in rapid and synergistic advances. For example, our tightly collaborative research allowed us to detect correlations between the coastline distances, strontium isotope ratios in the speleothems, and the abundance of shellfish in coastal sites ( Fisher et al., 2010; Jerardino and Marean, 2010 ). None of this would have been possible if we were working separately. I hope that NSF appreciates the value of these approaches and continues to fund paleoanthropology at a level commensurate with its needs. The financial requirements of modern field research, and particularly our need for statistically meaningful numbers of age estimates, have far outstripped the funds available in the Archaeology and Physical Anthropology programs at NSF. Copyright: Copyright 2016 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

PY - 2010/9

Y1 - 2010/9

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=77957660505&partnerID=8YFLogxK

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U2 - 10.1016/j.jhevol.2010.07.008

DO - 10.1016/j.jhevol.2010.07.008

M3 - Editorial

C2 - 20934083

AN - SCOPUS:77957660505

SN - 0047-2484

VL - 59

SP - 231

EP - 233

JO - Journal of human evolution

JF - Journal of human evolution

IS - 3-4

ER -