A view from the south: southern Africa before, during, and after the Last Glacial Maximum

Holocene prehistory in southern Africa is reasonably well researched, in part because a substantial number of excavated rockshelter sequences preserve bone and plant materials in informative contexts. Regional research designs have helped us go beyond sequence construction and stone tool typologies. Within these regional frameworks a small series of sites preserve materials from earlier time-periods, notably the millennia since the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). Thus it is now possible to try to interpret earlier very partial patterns against the more detailed and extensive information in Holocene contexts. We may be able to make only modest statements about the Terminal Pleistocene but we can see how different it was from later millennia and thus suggest alternative patterns of behaviour. In such interpretations, covering as they do the transformations of local climates from the extreme of about 20 000 years ago to the present, the role of environmental changes in stimulating behavioural changes is understandably highlighted by many researchers. Thus understanding the end of the Pleistocene necessarily involves both palaeoenvironmental and social reconstructions.