Event: Author Spotlight: Dwelling in the Divine: Ontological Reframings of Hunter-Gatherer Lifespace

This work focuses on Dunefield Midden on South Africa’s west coast, one of the world’s largest and best-preserved campsites of past foragers. Covered by windblown sand soon after abandonment, the site provides a snapshot of domestic life for some of the subcontinent’s last precolonial peoples. Its shallow, intact deposits encouraged an emphasis on horizontal exposure and spatial resolution by its excavators.

The book presents the results of a comprehensive spatial analysis and refitting program of meticulously mapped subsistence materials from Dunefield Midden. Ceramic cooking vessels, ostrich eggshell flasks, tortoiseshell bowls, and the bones of three differently sized ungulates, both wild and domesticated, are reassembled and their distributions compared to understand the cultural flows and natural forces that structured this exceptional site. Resulting patterns are interpreted with reference to diverse ethnoarchaeological, ethnographic, and ethnohistoric observations from Africa and beyond. What emerges is a uniquely detailed spatial reconstruction of hunter-gatherer material use histories, social organization, group identity, and spirituality

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Brian A. Stewart is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he is also Curator of African Archaeology at the Museum of Anthropological Archaeology. His research focuses on the evolution of human adaptive plasticity, with an emphasis on southern African hunter-gatherers. Currently he investigates the deep time development of socioeconomic strategies and religious traditions in southern Africa’s deserts and mountains. Beyond Africa, he is involved in research projects in East Asia and the Mediterranean. He obtained his doctorate (DPhil) from the University of Oxford in 2008 after previously studying there (MSt, 2001) and at the University of Vermont (BA, 2000).