Changes in the archaeological record in South Africa at 18 000 BP

One of the major preoccupations of Palaeolithic archaeologists has been the question of causality, and in particular the extent to which climatic and associated environmental changes influenced the technology, economy, and social organization of prehistoric people. As part of this paradigm, the South African evidence for the scale and timing of changes at the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) was gathered over the past few decades primarily to document the temporal and geographical limits of stone artefact industries and to find environmental correlates. The data, summarized below, show no simple correlation between environmental and technological change. Human demographic patterns and the structure of plant and animal communities, on the other hand, suggest that harsher climates of glacial cycles reduced population levels and species diversity relative to interglacial times to the extent that LGM environments have no modern analogue. The current challenge is to trace social changes and to identify in the archaeological record the relations of production characteristic of the modern San in the expectation that we should be able to recognize when the modern system of distributing food and material was initiated and what its correlates may be ( Lewis-Williams 1984 , Wadley 1988 ). This chapter examines the timing and nature of environmental, technological, economic, and demographic shifts to highlight the contrasting modes of glacial and interglacial times and to test whether changes in the forces and relations of production coincided with or were independent of environmental change around the time of the LGM.