Life Histories and Dynamic Objects: The Klasies River Mouth Collection

Abstract

Klasies River Mouth, a Middle Stone Age archaeological site along the southern coast of South Africa, has long held an iconic status within the field of archaeology, for many reasons. In the four decades since its original excavation, the site's artifact collection has demonstrated dynamic characteristics as the artifacts are analyzed, interpreted, and reinterpreted. The site and its collection became a standard (both scientifically and culturally) for comparing other Middle Stone Age sites. The collection, however, does more than just provide a comparative sample for archaeologists. The collection is a way to trace identity and shifting methodological and theoretical paradigms for Pleistocene archaeology. The life history of Klasies River Mouth pairs the physical materiality of the collection with its subsequent cultural (and disciplinary) cachet.As a historian, I have an active interest in the life histories of artifact collections. In my work, I find that understanding how different audiences consider a particular collection can highlight values, and how those values-scientific, methodological, ethical, and so on-change over time. On a theoretical level, a collection can serve as a temporal placeholder for different epistemologies, paradigms, methods, and manner of explanations. On a less esoteric level, the history of a collection can show particular cultural cachets as a dynamic, vibrant object, long after the collection is first curated. In the late twentieth-century history of archaeology, the Klasies River Mouth is an example of an entity with an interesting and rich life history providing us with insights about the original excavation and curating processes, but also about the changing paradigms of archaeological thought and theory.In 1967-1968, archaeological excavations began at a cave along the southern coast of South Africa-a site that dated to the Middle Stone Age; a Pleistocene site ranging from 280,000 to 25,000-50,000 years ago (Deacon 2001). Investigating archaeologists were motivated in their research to explore questions about the origins of modern humans; broadly, researchers were interested in any archaeological deposits that might provide insight about the nature of biological and cultural evolution in South Africa. Other synchronic archaeological sites in the coastal area indicated that any materials recovered from the area would prove to be most significant toward these research questions (Singer and Wymer 1982).A fantastic collection of archaeological material-in the form of stone tools (lithics); fauna; shellfish; and botanical remains-was successfully recovered from that original field season. The materials were quickly analyzed; the archaeological interpretations published (although the interpretations shifted significantly over decades);