Duinefontein 2: an Acheulean Site in the Western Cape Province of South Africa

Excavations at Duinefontein (DFT) 2 near Cape Town, South Africa have recov ered numerous stone artefacts and animal bones on an ancient surface sealed within iron-stained eolian sands. U-series analysis of an overlying calcre te places the sands before 150 ka ago, while the large mammal taxa imply an age between 400 and 200 ka ago. The artefacts include a classic Acheulean handaxe and probable biface shaping flakes that support this age estimate. The principal mammalian species are long-homed buffalo, black wilde-beest, greater kudu, Cape zebra, and grysbok/steenbok, which imply a grass-and-bus h mosaic instead of the historic small-leafed shrubland. Hippopotamus and reedbuck indicate that water stood nearby, probably in dun e swales. The large mammal bones are mostly vertebrae and other axial eleme nts, often in near-anatomical order. Both proximal and distal appendicular elements are rare. Bones with carnivore damage are common, but ones with st one tool marks are scarce. The sum suggests a water-edge attritional death site where people played a minimal role and carcasses were disarticulated m ainly by carnivore feeding and by trampling. Stone tool marks tend to be eq ually rare at other Acheulean attritional death sites, and the implication may be that Acheulean people rarely obtained large mammals, whether by hunt ing or scavenging. Human scavengers at DFT2 would not have encountered a di sproportionate number of distal (versus proximal) limb elements, and it fol lows that the tendency for distal elements to dominate many archeological a ssemblages need not reflect scavenging versus hunting. Even if DFT2 was not itself a locus of intense human activity, it provides useful baseline for evaluating bone damage, skeletal part representation, and other variables a t sites where people were deeply involved. (C) 1999 Academic Press.