Early Maritime Desert Dwellers in Namaqualand, South Africa: A Holocene Perspective on Pleistocene Peopling

South Africa’s northern Namaqualand coastal desert is the southern extension of the Namib. Today, this region is semi-desert with patchy subsistence resources and scarce, unpredictable rainfall. Yet this ancient desert landscape possesses residues of human activity stretching back into the Middle Pleistocene, evidenced by heavily weathered surface finds, including handaxes and Victoria West cores. Such old finds in so harsh an environment raise important questions: how do human movements into this area relate to local palaeoenvironmental changes, and how has this relationship changed through time? While no dated Middle Pleistocene sites presently exist to reconstruct the earliest hominin dispersals, several late Pleistocene sites now have chronostratigraphic sequences that can be brought to bear on these questions. This article presents chronological and subsistence-settlement data for one such site, Spitzkloof A Rockshelter in northern Namaqualand’s rugged Richtersveld. Humans are shown to have visited the site very sporadically between ∼50,000 and 17,000 cal BP. Unlike most of the subcontinent, the most intensive occupations occur during early Marine Isotope Stage 2, when multiple proxies suggest enhanced humidity associated with intensified winter rainfall. We examine these data using the region’s better-developed Holocene archaeological record to create predictions about the earliest coastal desert dwellers. Received 3 November 2015; accepted 14 July 2016. Address correspondence to Genevive Dewar, Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto Scarborough, 1265 Military Trail, Toronto, Ontario M1C 1A4, Canada. E-mail: [email protected] Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at http://www.tandfonline.com/uica.