A Foraging Nexus
Space, Food, and Magic at Dunefield Midden, South Africa
By (author) Brian A. Stewart Foreword by John Parkington
Hardback (Published)
(March 2026)
ISBN: 9781950446773
8.5 x 11.02 inches
Price: $96.00
In stock
This book explores domestic life at Dunefield Midden, South Africa, one of the world’s largest and best-preserved forager campsites. Spatial analyses of diverse materials afford detailed insights into hunter-gatherer object biographies, social organization, identity, and spirituality.
Dunefield Midden on South Africa’s west coast is one of the world’s largest and best-preserved campsites of past foragers. Covered by windblown sand soon after abandonment, it provides a snapshot of domestic life for some of the subcontinent’s last precolonial peoples. The site’s shallow, intact deposits encouraged an emphasis on horizontal exposure and spatial resolution on the part of its excavators, John Parkington and his students at the University of Cape Town. Those efforts spanned more than a decade and resulted in the recovery of nearly 1,000 square meters of Later Stone Age archaeology, including over 100 features interspersed with diverse shell, bone, and artifact assemblages. Twenty-seven radiocarbon dates on charcoal and marine shells constrain the site’s occupation to between AD 1300 and 1400, with a cumulative duration of no more than a few months.
This book presents the results of a comprehensive spatial analysis and refitting program of an array of meticulously mapped subsistence materials from Dunefield Midden. Ceramic cooking vessels, ostrich eggshell flasks, tortoiseshell bowls, and the bones of three differently sized ungulates, both wild and domesticated, are reassembled and their distributions compared to understand the cultural flows and natural forces that structured this exceptional site. Resulting patterns are interpreted with reference to diverse ethnoarchaeological, ethnographic, and ethnohistoric observations from Africa and beyond. What emerges is a uniquely detailed spatial reconstruction of hunter-gatherer material use-histories, social organization, group identity, and spirituality.
Foreword
Acknowledgments
List of Figures
List of Tables
1. Introduction
2. Dunefield Midden: Regional Setting, Site Overview, and Previous Research
3. Historical, Analytical, and Methodological Frameworks
4. The Ceramic Vessels
5. The Organic Containers
6. The Bovid Bones
7. Piecing Together the Puzzle: Assemblage Formation and Site Structure
8. A Foraging Nexus: Identity, Sociality, and Spirituality at Dunefield Midden
9. Conclusion
Glossary of Khoe-San Terms
References
Endnotes
Index
Brian A. Stewart is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he is also Curator of African Archaeology at the Museum of Anthropological Archaeology. His research focuses on the evolution of human adaptive plasticity, with an emphasis on southern African hunter-gatherers. Currently he investigates the deep time development of socioeconomic strategies and religious traditions in southern Africa’s deserts and mountains. Beyond Africa, he is involved in research projects in East Asia and the Mediterranean. He obtained his doctorate (DPhil) from the University of Oxford in 2008 after previously studying there (MSt, 2001) and at the University of Vermont (BA, 2000).
- By (author) Brian A. Stewart
- Foreword by John Parkington
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