Later Stone Age

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The Later Stone Age or Late Stone Age ( LSA for short ) is an epoch of sub-Saharan prehistory of Africa that follows the Early Stone Age and Middle Stone Age and is defined by the technology of stone tools . The term was first introduced for South Africa by Astley John Hilary Goodwin and C. van Riet Lowe in their book The Stone Age Cultures of South Africa (1929) . In German-speaking palaeolithic research, too, the terms are used without translation, which is mainly related to the chronological structure that differs from that of Europe.

The Later Stone Age begins around 50,000 BC. BC and thus a little earlier than the Upper Palaeolithic of Europe. The LSA is characterized by the fact that there is a far greater variety of stone tools than in the previous epoch. In addition, a relatively large number of bone tools are found in the LSA sites.

The end of the LSA (in the narrower sense) has - as in Europe - an approximate temporal correspondence with the end of the Pleistocene . Late LSA inventories are referred to as the "Albany Industry" (approximately 12,000-9,000 BP ). This is followed by “Wilton inventories” (approx. 9,000-2,000 BP ), which are also defined using stone tools , which are placed in the Holocene and, due to their microlithic character, are similar to the European Mesolithic . The term late Later Stone Age has not caught on because a symposium in 1967 suggested that the term lithic industries should be used as a preference.

literature

  • JD Clark: Precision and Definition in African Archeology. In: South African Bulletin. 21, 83/3 (1966), pp. 114-121.
  • Gudrun Corvinus: Chapter Southern Africa. In: Ofer Bar-Yosef et al. (Ed.): New research on the Paleolithic. Research on general and comparative archeology (AVA), Volume 4. Verlag CH Beck, Munich 1984, pp. 465-547.
  • J. Deacon: Later Stone Age people and their descendants in southern Africa. In: Klein, RG (Ed.): Southern African prehistory and palaeoenvironments. Balkema, Rotterdam 1984, pp. 221-328.
  • Hilary Deacon: Human Beginnings in South Africa . 1999, ISBN 0-86486-417-5 , Learning about the past ( online ).
  • Chronology of the Later Stone Age and Food Production in East Africa . 1998, doi : 10.1006 / jasc.1997.0277 .

Web links

Commons : Later Stone Age  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Astley John Hilary Goodwin, C. van Riet Lowe: The Stone Age Cultures of South Africa. Annals of the South African Museum, Volume 27, Neill and Co, Edinburgh 1929.
  2. ↑ Corvinus 1984, pp 465-466.
  3. ^ Corvinus 1984, p. 478.
  4. ↑ Clark 1968.
  5. ^ Corvinus 1984, pp. 465-478.