Fieldwork (Data Recovery) methods in African Stone Age research

Abstract

The current state of human evolutionary studies owe much to the generations of committed researchers whose field expeditions to African Stone Age sites have produced groundbreaking findings. The research practices that characterize today’s archaeological fieldwork in Africa have come a long way since the pioneering era. Before the 1950s, most fieldwork expeditions did not follow systematic site documentation and excavation protocols, many of the practitioners had limited academic training, projects were rarely driven by clear scientific questions beyond the fervor to find the most “ancient” fossils or artifacts, and the recovered materials were analyzed in an ad hoc manner without much consideration of their geological contexts. Consequently, the resulting datasets were subjected to biased and inaccurate interpretations. In many instances, the European record was considered as a universal model for placing sites in temporal and cultural groupings. These are legacies with far-reaching implications for current and future research practices in Africa. Current prehistoric archaeological fieldwork in Africa strives to generate spatially, chronologically, and paleoenvironmentally well-contextualized datasets from which researchers seek to answer fundamental questions about human evolutionary history. Research projects are increasingly becoming collaborative and interdisciplinary, drawing on methods and utilizing experts from the fields of geology, geography, zoology, and primatology, to name just a few of the common disciplines. Against this background, this chapter discusses fieldwork approaches commonly employed by researchers studying African Stone Age sites and the ways in which the emergent methods are facilitating the recovery of high-resolution datasets.