A dissertation submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Archaeology of the University of Witwatersrand in 2017. / Over the past decade a new method of statistical shape analysis, geometric morphometrics, has been applied to the study of artefact shapes. Later Stone Age (LSA) tanged stone arrowheads, hypothesized to act as stylistic markers among prehistoric southern African hunter-gatherer groups, have been analysed with geometric morphometrics and reveal spatially coherent variations in their shape. After being tested against several variables that may have had an effect on arrowhead shape, these stylistic spatial variations could very well indicate large scale linguistic or other kinds of boundaries between different elements of prehistoric San populations. Understanding them can shed light on the social and economic organization of southern African hunter-gatherers during the later Holocene. / LG2017
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:wits/oai:wiredspace.wits.ac.za:10539/23560 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Smeyatsky, Ilan Ryan |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | Online resource (119 leaves), application/pdf |
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