Opportunistic Subsistence Strategies among Late Holocene Coastal Hunter-Gatherers, Elands Bay, South Africa

Abstract

ABSTRACT Hunting and gathering was practiced for many hundreds of thousands of years in South Africa's Western Cape region, until ceramics and a stock-keeping economy first appeared c. 2,000 years ago, and in the Elands Bay and Lamberts Bay areas 200 years later. Subsistence and settlement patterns in this part of the West Coast of South Africa changed dramatically after this date, but the nature of interactions between indigenous groups engaging with these two types of subsistence practices is still poorly understood. The cultural-contact scenarios so far proposed view this interaction as basically competitive, with forager groups living at the margins of herder society and compelled to change their subsistence and settlement choices by focusing on small food parcels and having to move to less accessible areas. Observations from Borrow Pit Midden and other sites in the study area do not support this scenario. Instead, their records suggest flexible adaptive responses among foragers when at coastal and pericoastal locations. Overall, an opportunistic subsistence strategy was practiced mostly within the immediate surrounding environment of camps with high mobility, characterizing forager settlement. The components of a new cultural-contact model are emerging, but much remains to be done before it is established on a reliable empirical foundation.