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Primordialism and the ‘Pleistocene San’ of southern Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 July 2016

Justin Pargeter ,
Alex MacKay ,
Peter Mitchell ,
John Shea  and
Brian A. Stewart
Justin Pargeter
Affiliation:
Interdepartmental Doctoral Program in Anthropological Sciences, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794, USA (Email: justin.pargeter@stonybrook.edu) Department of Anthropology and Development Studies, University of Johannesburg, Auckland Park 2006, South Africa
Alex MacKay
Affiliation:
Centre for Archaeological Science, School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Wollongong, Northfields Avenue, Wollongong, NSW 2522, Australia
Peter Mitchell
Affiliation:
School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Private Bag X3, Wits 2050, South Africa School of Archaeology, University of Oxford, 36 Beaumont Street, Oxford OX1 2PG, UK
John Shea
Affiliation:
Anthropology Department, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794, USA
Brian A. Stewart
Affiliation:
Museum of Anthropological Archaeology, University of Michigan, 1109 Geddes Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1079, USA Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, Private Bag X3, Wits 2050, South Africa
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Abstract

Analogies are an important tool of archaeological reasoning. The Kalahari San are frequently depicted in introductory texts as archetypal, mobile hunter-gatherers, and they have influenced approaches to archaeological, genetic and linguistic research. But is this analogy fundamentally flawed? Recent arguments have linked the San populations of southern Africa with the late Pleistocene Later Stone Age (c. 44 kya) at Border Cave, South Africa. The authors argue that these and other claims for the Pleistocene antiquity of modern-day cultures arise from a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of cultural and archaeological taxonomies, and that they are a misuse of analogical reasoning.

Type
Debate
Information
Antiquity , Volume 90 , Issue 352 , August 2016 , pp. 1072 - 1079
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd, 2016 

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