Оңтүстік Африкадағы Бломбос үңгірінің археологиялық қазбалары

Archaeological site in Western Cape, South Africa

Blombos Cave is an archaeological site located in Blombos Private Nature Reserve, about 300 km east of Cape Town on the Southern Cape coastline, South Africa. The cave contains Middle Stone Age (MSA) deposits currently dated at between c. 100,000 and 70,000 years Before Present (BP), and a Late Stone Age sequence dated at between 2000 and 300 years BP. The cave site was first excavated in 1991 and field work has been conducted there on a regular basis since 1997, and is ongoing. The excavations at Blombos Cave have yielded important new information on the behavioural evolution of anatomically modern humans. The archaeological record from this cave site has been central in the ongoing debate on the cognitive and cultural origin of early humans and to the current understanding of when and where key behavioural innovations emerged among Homo sapiens in southern Africa during the Late Pleistocene. Archaeological material and faunal remains recovered from the Middle Stone Age phase in Blombos Cave – dated to ca. 100,000–70,000 years BP – are considered to represent greater ecological niche adaptation, a more diverse set of subsistence and procurements strategies, adoption of multi step technology and manufacture of composite tools, stylistic elaboration, increased economic and social organisation and occurrence of symbolically mediated behaviour. The most informative archaeological material from Blombos Cave includes engraved ochre, engraved bone ochre processing kits, refined bone and stone tools and a broad range of terrestrial and marine faunal remains, including shellfish, birds, tortoise and ostrich egg shell, and mammals of various sizes. These findings, together with subsequent re analysis and excavation of other Middle Stone Age sites in southern Africa, have resulted in a paradigm shift with regard to the understanding of the timing and location of the development of modern human behaviour. On 29 May 2015 Heritage Western Cape formally protected the site as a provincial heritage site. Cross hatching done in ochre on a stone fragment found at Blombos Cave is believed to be the earliest known drawing done by a human in the world.

Blombos Cave was first excavated in 1991–1992 as a part of Professor Christopher S. Henshilwood's (1995) doctoral thesis. at the University of Cambridge: Holocene archaeology of the coastal Garcia State Forest, southern Cape, South Africa. Blombos Cave was originally one of nine Holocene Later Stone Age sites that Henshilwood excavated and it was first given the acronym GSF8 (Garcia State Forest, site no. 8). In 1997 GSF8 was renamed Blombos Cave and given its current acronym: BBC. at the University of Bergen and the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, together with Professor Francesco d'Errico from the University of Bordeaux 1, France. The aim of TRACSYMBOLS project is to examine how key behavioural innovations emerged among Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis in southern Africa and Europe respectively, and to explore whether and how environmental variability influenced this development between 180,000 – 25,000 years ago, primarily by combining archaeological results, original multi proxy palaeoenvironmental data and climatic simulations for two continents. From 2017 the cave site continues to be excavated by many of the same researchers under the newly funded Centre for Early Sapiens Behaviour (SapienCE) at the University of Bergen, Norway. The centre is formed in cooperation with Witwatersrand University, Royal Holloway University of London, Université de Bordeaux, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen and UNI research, Bergen, Norway. The aim is to follow an even broader multi disciplinary approach, and the 10 year programme include cognitive studies, neuroscience, geoscience, climate modelling and reconstruction, fauna etc.

The cave is in a south facing cliff face 34.5 meters above sea level, ca. 100 meters from the present day shoreline. The cave formation is set in calcretes of the Wankoe Formation, and the geological setting indicates that the cave was formed by wave action sometime during the Plio Pleistocene. The interior of Blombos Cave consists of a single main chamber, and the entire (accessible) interior cave floor is about 39 m2 behind the drip line. West of the cave's main chamber, the anthropogenic deposit extends inwardly 3–5 meters. In this area, however, the cave ceiling lowers to a point where it falls in level with the surface, preventing access to the deposit beneath. In the area north east of the main chamber, the deposit expands into a low laying ante chamber of unknown extent due to the sand filling it. By the end of the 2011 field season about 19.5 m2 of interior cave has been dug during the Blombos Cave excavations. Blombos Cave's outer talus forms a gently sloping platform of about 23 m2 that extends 4–5 meters southwards, before the terrain abruptly drops down towards the shoreline that lies some 34.5 meters below the cave entrance. The talus, which primarily consists of Middle Stone Age deposit, rock fall and unconsolidated sediments, is stabilized by an area of large, exposed blocks (14 m2). At some stage – and in between the prehistoric occupation of the cave site – these blocks have fallen down from the rock face above, effectively preventing site erosion and allowing sediments to stabilize and accumulate in front of the cave's drip line. Calcium carbonate (CaCO3) rich ground water seeps in from the cave roof and percolates through the interior sediments, resulting in an alkaline environment with good preservation conditions. The excavated Middle Stone Age deposit in Blombos Cave consists of aeolian (wind borne) dune sand, blown in through the cave entrance, and roof spall from the cave ceiling. Intermixed with these sandy matrices are decomposed marine and terrestrial faunal remains (fish, shellfish, egg shell, and animal bones) and organic material. Large combustion features, small basin shaped hearths and carbonized horizons are recorded throughout the whole MSA sequence.

When the excavation started at Blombos Cave in 1992 the cave entrance was partially sealed by dune sand, and about 20 cm of sterile aeolian deposit covered the interior Later Stone Age deposit. Underneath the aeolian sand surface, seven main phases of occupation have been identified in the 2.5–3 meter deep Blombos Cave stratigraphic sequence, three in the Later Stone Age (L1–L3) and four in the Middle Stone Age (M1, Upper M2, Lower M2 and M3). These phases are further divided into finer lenses and sub lenses, most of them less than 10 cm thick. The Later Stone Age and Middle Stone Age levels are separated by a 5–50 cm thick, sterile unit named 'Hiatus' or 'DUN'. The Hiatus consists of yellow aeolian sand that blew into the cave at about 68,000–70,000 years BP, and shows little disturbance from the overlying Later Stone Age units. Humans have briefly and sporadically occupied Blombos Cave throughout the Middle Stone Age (101,000–70,000 years BP) and in the latter parts of the Later Stone Age (2,000–300 years BP). The occupational hiatus between ca. 68,000 and 2,000 years BP, combined with the geological evidence, indicates that the cave site was sealed off by aeolian sand during this period. uranium thorium series (U/Th) The lowest levels of the M3 phase has a preliminary age of greater than 130,000 years ago, while the unexcavated sediments below these levels remain undated (June 2013).

The hiatus level (DUN) composed of undisturbed aeolian sand overlying the M1 phase is dated by OSL to 69,000 ± 5,000 and 70,000 ± 5000 years BP, while OSL ages ranging from 74,900 ± 4,300 to 72,500 ± 4,600 years BP have been obtained for the upper part of the M1 phase, i. e. the units associated with the Still Bay techno tradition. (see next paragraphs). TL ages for the M1 phase are 74,000 ± 5,000 and 78,000 ± 6,000 years BP. raised towards the luminescence based Middle Stone Age chronology established by Jacobs et al. 2008 on methodological grounds related to errors in the manipulation of the luminescence data and estimation of uncertainties in the dose rates. The Middle Stone Age chronology for Blombos Cave derived from optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) ages Still Bay points have bifacially retouched sides, are elliptic to lanceolate shaped and most often they have two pointed apices. Since the excavation in Blombos Cave began, more than 500 points or point fragments have been recovered, of which 352 have been described in detail. While hard hammer and direct percussion was used in the initial reduction phase (phase 1), followed by soft hammer and marginal percussion (phase 2), pressure flaking was only used during the final retouch phase (3), and a few points were also reworked by hard hammer percussion (phase 4). or both. Some researchers have suggested that the seeming concern for the appearance of the finished point may represent evidence for social and stylistic elaboration during the MSA. similar to the ones observed ethnographically. Högberg and Larsson 2011 hypothesise that blanks and unfinished Still Bay points were purposely left behind in Hollow Rock Shelter, perhaps for use at a later stage or as an act of solidarity with other hunter gatherer groups. According to the research published in the journal Nature, the find was "a prime indicator of modern cognition" in our species and an ochre crayon was used by early African Homo sapiens inscribed onto the stone. "The abrupt termination of all lines on the fragment edges indicates that the pattern originally extended over a larger surface," said archaeologist and lead author of the study Christopher Henshilwood.]] Ochre – an iron rich mineral – is regularly found at Stone Age sites throughout southern Africa, and has also been recovered from the Middle Stone Age levels in Blombos Cave. More than 8,000 pieces of ochre like material, of which more than 1500 are 10 mm or more in length, have been recovered from the Middle Stone Age levels of Blombos Cave. Many of them show use wear traces from intentional use and processing. In 2002 the recovery of two finely engraved ochre pieces – both deriving from the Still Bay units (M1 phase) – was reported in Science Magazine. Wonderwerk Cave and Klasies River Cave 1. Arguably, these engraved pieces of ochre represent – together with the engraved ostrich egg shells from Diepkloof – the earliest forms of abstract representation and conventional design tradition hitherto recorded. Geometric or iconographic representations have traditionally been archaeological categories associated with modern human behaviour and cognitive complexity. The evidence from Blombos Cave – and from sites like Klasies River, Diepkloof Rock Shelter, Klein Kliphuis and Wonderwerk cave – implies that abstract representations were made in southern Africa at least 30,000 years earlier than in Europe and that stylistic elaboration and symbolic traditions were common in southern Africa 70,000–100,000 years ago. The incised ochre pieces recovered from Blombos Cave and various other Middle Stone Age sites indicates that there was a spatial and temporal continuity in the production and use of conventional symbols in the region. The soft, iron rich ochre would have been ground to powder and turned into a reddish paint, perhaps for cave or body painting. Shell beads and bone tools found alongside the ochre stones support the idea that the early humans using this cave were interested in ornamentation.

In 2008 an ochre processing workshop consisting of two toolkits was uncovered in the 100,000 year old levels at Blombos Cave, South Africa. In addition to conventional bone tools, a modified bone fragment marked with eight parallel lines has also been recovered from the Still Bay phase. Most academics now believe that marine shells were used as beads in the Near East, North Africa, and Sub Saharan Africa at least 30,000 years earlier than their first use in Europe. Besides Blombos Cave, there are a number of African and Middle East sites that all have yielded strong evidence for the early use of personal ornaments: Skul and Qafzeh, Israel, Oued Djebbana, Algeria,

No skeletal remains have been found in Blombos Cave and the amount of other types of recovered human material from the Middle Stone Age units amounts only to seven teeth. The crown diameters of at least some of these teeth are morphometric "modern" in terms of tooth size reduction, implying that the humans occupying Blombos Cave were anatomically modern. This conclusion is supported by similar evidence from a nearby archaeological site, Klasies River Caves, that dates to a similar time period.

At Blombos Cave a great variety of terrestrial and marine faunal remains are consistently found throughout the Later Stone Age and Middle Stone age phases. This is because aspects of MSA behaviours related to artefact production, subsistence, pigment use and migration patterns are increasingly being linked to periods of climatic, and by extension environmental change. Establishing a link, if any, between MSA lifeways and the environmental context in which MSA behaviours developed is complex. While some researchers argue for links between extreme climate change and social change there is some debate. The aim of current research efforts focusing on MSA environments is therefore two fold. Firstly, improving the temporal resolution of proxies by applying suitable dating methods such as radiocarbon, uranium series, luminescence, etc. Secondly and most importantly, is to refine the available proxy database so that ambiguous and often, conflicting interpretations can be re assessed as new information emerges. In light of this, two key studies have emerged, Jacobs and Roberts

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