Characterising Middle Stone Age core forms along the Doring River, South Africa, and their implications for past technological organisation

Much of the archaeological record in southern Africa occurs as open-air surface scatters of flaked stone artefacts. While historically prominent, these surface artefacts now play a very limited role in reconstructing human behaviour during the Middle and Later Stone Ages. Given suitable caveats, typologies allow links to be developed between open-air surface scatters and temporally controlled excavated samples, the latter often recovered from rock shelters. Among the limitations of this approach are the incomplete rock shelter record for developing type seriations, and the fact that technological behaviours may vary across a landscape, restricting the inferential capacity of assemblages from specific contexts. In this article, we describe four persistent core forms identified during surveys of the Doring River, and attempt to situate them in the regional archaeological sequence using previously excavated samples and intra-site spatial coherence with known culture-historical entities. Our results provide plausible core type markers for the Later Middle Stone Age and Still Bay in the region, and also fill out aspects of artefact transport in a regional technological system that have previously been masked by a site-based approach.