Abstract

Klasies River Main site, on South Africa's southern Cape coast, has contributed significantly to understanding Late Pleistocene human evolution. Excavations across this complex of caves and rock shelters have uncovered important assemblages of human fossils, faunal remains and lithic artefacts which have allowed interpretations of human anatomy and behaviour, and the palaeoenvironmental context of human occupations. The stratigraphy of the site is complicated, and the deposits have been recorded and published at varying degrees of resolution and detail over three phases of fieldwork. This paper is the first detailed review of the stratigraphy of any part of the sequence, and considers the different stratigraphic approaches used at Klasies and the published data and interpretations for the basal deposits. These units have been assigned to the Light Brown Sand, Rubble Brown Sand and Shell and Sand Members, and have yielded MSA I and MSA II lithic assemblages and most of the human fossils. We argue that some of the published stratigraphic interpretations need to be reconsidered, that a purely lithostratigraphic approach to the deposits at Klasies is not currently viable and that further field description and micromorphological work is needed. More broadly, this review demonstrates potential complications for stratigraphic correlation during the reinvestigation of previously excavated sites. These include the importance of understanding site formation processes in a lithostratigraphic system, and the need to think about how, why and at what resolution we make correlations between different stratigraphic systems or different areas within a site or site complex.