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- Title
The 'Sand-Bath' and Lithic Heat Treatment in the South African Middle Stone Age: Myth or Reality?
- Authors
Schmidt, Patrick
- Abstract
When heat treatment of silcrete for stone knapping was first discovered in the South African Middle Stone Age (MSA), the procedure used for it was suggested to be similar to the one used for heat treatment of finer rocks in other parts of the world: slow sand-bath heating. This comparison may have been based on published data from the fields of ethnography, experimentation and archaeology, describing sand-bath like structures and processes. In this review, I discuss whether the available data from these three fields indeed justify the suggestions that sand-bath heating was used in the context of MSA silcrete heat treatment. A careful revaluation of the available data shows that, although sand-bath heating is a widely accepted procedure that is documented in other parts of the world, understanding the earliest known cases of heat treatment in the MSA calls for another technical procedure.
- Subjects
SOUTH Africa; HEAT treatment; MESOLITHIC Period; SILCRETE; ROCK craft; ETHNOARCHAEOLOGY
- Publication
African Archaeological Review, 2016, Vol 33, Issue 2, p99
- ISSN
0263-0338
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/s10437-016-9217-z