Is it Time to Retire NASTIES in Southern African? Moving Beyond the Culture-historical Framework for Middle Stone Age Lithic Assemblage Variability

Abstract

The Middle Stone Age (MSA) of southern Africa provides crucial insight on early Homo sapiens behavioral evolution. Archaeologists have traditionally presented lithic assemblage variability as a sequence of discrete Named Stone Tool Industries (“NASTIES”, Shea, 2014, Quaternary International) or techno-complexes. Many have highlighted the issues associated with the archaeological systematics of this time period in southern Africa and beyond, yet the original framework continues to persist. This paper presents two case studies from the Late Pleistocene that further problematize the usefulness of NASTIES. First, the Pinnacle Point complex of sites show that significant landscape-scale variability between coeval lithic assemblages defies the traditional classification system. Second, investigating the relationship between technological and environmental change has led to conflicting results that cannot be resolved when NASTIES are the units of analysis. While lithic data are key for understanding early Homo sapiens behavioral evolution, NASTIES are not the best tools for doing so.