Judith Sealy Quotes

In this area, people were able to choose from a long menu of foods including venison and the meat of other wild animals, berries, edible roots and corms, particularly of plants in the iris family, seafood including shellfish, fish, seabirds, stranded dolphins or whales, and much else. All these items have been identified in excavated food remains. It is, however, harder to know their relative importance.

There is an extensive literature on the use of ethnography in archaeology and the dangers of simplistic assumptions that past societies were necessarily like recent ones.

What's surprising about it is the degree of specialisation in local resources, from which we can infer that these people were living within relatively small areas, rather than trekking regularly across large areas of landscape. This is unexpected, given the very mobile lifestyle of most recent southern African hunter-gatherers.

Bone tissue accumulates over many years, so this was a long-term dietary pattern. People buried at Matjes River Rock Shelter, on the other hand, ate much more mixed diets, with more terrestrial food or low trophic level [low on the food chain] marine foods, such as shellfish.

It is often very hard to recognize when similar elements were deployed in different social and cultural systems in the past, as I argue is the case here.

It is true that many burials were isolated interments in scattered localities, but other caves also contained large numbers of graves--Whitchers Cave, for example. Unfortunately, this was excavated early in the twentieth century, and most of the remains recovered have been lost. We are interested in what the placement of graves meant to the survivors, and how this fitted in with peoples' concepts of the landscape.