Journal article
Primordialism and the 'Pleistocene San' of southern Africa
- Abstract:
- Analogies are an important tool of archaeological reasoning. The Kalahari San are frequently depicted in introductory texts as archetypal, mobile hunter-gatherers, and they have influenced approaches to archaeological, genetic and linguistic research. But is this analogy fundamentally flawed? Recent arguments have linked the San populations of southern Africa with the late Pleistocene Later Stone Age (c. 44 kya) at Border Cave, South Africa. The authors argue that these and other claims for the Pleistocene antiquity of modern-day cultures arise from a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of cultural and archaeological taxonomies, and that they are a misuse of analogical reasoning.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Author's original, pdf, 300.2KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.15184/aqy.2016.100
Authors
- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
- Journal:
- Antiquity More from this journal
- Volume:
- 90
- Issue:
- 352
- Pages:
- 1072-1079
- Publication date:
- 2016-07-19
- Acceptance date:
- 2016-01-20
- DOI:
- ISSN:
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1745-1744
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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pubs:634679
- UUID:
-
uuid:c83240db-c713-425e-98cd-227d605d38ba
- Local pid:
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pubs:634679
- Source identifiers:
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634679
- Deposit date:
-
2016-07-20
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Antiquity Publications Ltd
- Copyright date:
- 2016
- Notes:
- This is a pre-print version of a journal article published by Cambridge University Press in Antiquity: a Quarterly Review of Archaeology on 2016-07-19, available online: https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2016.100
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