Tool-stone selection in the African Middle stone age at Sibhudu cave

by Patrick Schmidt, Klaus G. Nickel The raw materials people used for making stone tools may contain information about their territory, exchange routs or the selection criteria they employed during provisioning.

In this study, we measure the mechanical properties of different tool-stones used by foragers living during the Middle Stone Age at Sibhudu Cave in South Africa. The site yielded a long and continuous sequence that saw transitions between different raw materials and tool forms.

We evaluate the quality of these different stones for tool making and use, attempting to find correlations between selected raw materials and the tools made from them. We find that the raw materials used at Sibhudu have substantially different qualities, some being easy to flake but weak upon use, some being tough during stone knapping and resistant during use.

Comparing these data with the appearance and disappearance of tool types throughout the Sibhudu sequence, we note that tool-stones requiring lower flaking forces were more often retouched than those requiring great forces.