The Earlier Stone Age Lithic Assemblage from Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape Province, South Africa

The site of Wonderwerk Cave, located in the Northern Cape Province between the towns of Danielskuil and Kuruman, preserves an extraordinary sequence that spans close to 2 million years of hominin activity (see Chazan and Horwitz, this volume, for an overview of the site). The earliest phases of occupation have only been recovered in Excavation 1 near the front of the cave in excavations carried out by Peter Beaumont between 1979 and 1992. The dating of this sequence has been the main thrust of publications on Excavation 1 (Beaumont & Vogel 2006; Chazan et al. 2008). Analysis of the lithic assemblage from the Acheulean occupation is now well advanced and a preliminary report on this analysis, focused on the bifaces that are the dominant component of the assemblage, is presented here. The basal assemblage from Archaeological Stratum 12, which is attributed to the Oldowan, is not discussed here (see Chazan et al. 2012). The results of analysis of the Acheulean bifaces from Excavation 1 identify important trends in the development of biface technology through the Wonderwerk sequence. Beaumont excavated in a yard square grid inherited from earlier excavations by Malan (Malan & Cooke 1941; Malan & Wells 1943). He excavated by stratigraphic layer and within each stratigraphic layer by 5-10 cm. spits. The Earlier Stone Age corresponds to Archaeological Strata 11-6. Our team has developed a sequence of Sedimentary Units for Archaeological Strata 9-12 as part of a program to date the exposed sections of Excavation 1 (Chazan et al. 2008; Chazan & Horwitz, in this volume). Unfortunately, artifacts recovered by Beaumont cannot be securely correlated to the sedimentary units so the Archaeological Strata form the basis for this study. In Beaumont’s excavation all sediments were sieved through a fine mesh and all material recovered in the sieves is curated in the McGregor Museum (Beaumont 1990; Beaumont & Vogel 2006). The bulk of the material from Excavation 1 is non-artefactual rubble and the actual artifact assemblage is remarkably small, given the scale of the excavation and the time depth it represents (Table 1). The size of the flake and core assemblage from the Acheulean limits the observations that can be made about these aspects of technology. There is little evidence for prepared core technology and no evidence for blade production from these contexts. The initial stage of analysis focused on collecting metric data for the biface assemblage, using the methods developed by Roe (1964). The results of this analysis point to a high degree of stability through the sequence, particularly in terms of the size of bifaces. Thus no evidence was found to support Beaumont’s assertion that the Stratum 5 through 8 assemblages were dominated by small handaxes and thus fit with the criteria for the Fauresmith. Based on the absence of both blade production and small bifaces we suggest that Strata 10-5 in Excavation 1 are best attributed to the Acheulean. The Stratum 11 assemblage is too small for a cultural attribution. The most striking aspect to emerge from the metric analysis is a reduction in the thickness of bifaces between Archaeological Stratum 9 and Archaeological Stratum 8. This trend remains apparent when one looks at length/thickness, with an increase in this value between Archaeological Stratum 9 and Archaeological Stratum 8. A second stage of analysis has now focused on a qualitative description of the production sequence for each handaxe. The results of this analysis are presented here for Strata 11-8, which corresponds to the section for which ages have been determined based on a combination of palaeomagnetism and cosmogenic burial age dating (Chazan et al. 2008; Matmon et al. 12012, Chazan & Horwitz, in this volume).