Raw material use and behavioral modernity: Howiesons Poort lithic foraging strategies.

In an important early attempt to apply behavioral ecological modeling to lithic resource use and the archaeological record, Ambrose and Lorenz (1990) investigated the problem of the Howiesons Poort sub-stage (HP) in the southern African Middle Stone Age (MSA). In that paper, Ambrose and Lorenz compared general mobility patterns (based on lithic raw material occurrences) to the general environmental setting to reach the conclusion that MSA people behaved in a way that was different from any modern peoples, whether ethnographically or archaeologically characterized. At the time of its writing, this work was used to support the idea that MSA people, during the period of time prior to that which the HP represents, were not behaving in a fully modern fashion. More recently, Ambrose (2002) revisited the use of raw materials in the HP. Although no longer positing ‘‘non-modern’’ behavior, this paper continued to try and explain a pattern of a marked increase of fine-grained raw material use in comparison to other MSA components at Klasies by invoking distant sources for these materials. As Ambrose and Lorenz (1990) is