References CHIRIKURE, S. & I. PIKIRAYI. 2008. Inside and outside the dry stone walls: revisiting the material culture of Great Zimbabwe. Antiquity 82: 1-18. PIKIRAYI, I. 2001. The Zimbabwe culture: origins and decline in southern Zambezian states. Walnut Creek/ New York/Oxford: Altamira. Further Reading LINDAHL, A. & I. PIKIRAYI. 2010. Ceramics and change: an overview of pottery production techniques in northern South Africa and eastern Zimbabwe during the first and second millennium AD. Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 2(3): 133-49. PIKIRAYI, I. 1993. The archaeological identity of the Mutapa state: towards an historical archaeology of northern Zimbabwe (Studies in African Archaeology 6). Uppsala: Societas Archaeologica Upsaliensis. - 1999. Research trends in the historical archaeology of Zimbabwe, in P.P. A. Funari, M. Hall & S. Jones (ed.). Historical archaeology: back from the edge: 67-84. London. Routledge. - 2006. Gold, black ivory and houses of stone, in M. Hall & S. Silliman (ed.) Historical archaeology (Blackwell Studies in Global Archaeology: A Prospectus). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. - 2009a. The archaeology of sub-Saharan Africa: an over- view, in B. Cunliffe, C. Gosden, & R.A. Joyce (ed.) The Oxford handbook of archaeology: 723-62. Oxford: Oxford University Press. - 2009b. The past within the present: the contemporary uses of Mapungubwe, in S. Tiley-Nel (ed.) Mapungubwe remembered: 250-58. Johannesburg: Chris Van Rensburg Publications Pty (Ltd). Pinnacle Point: Excavation and Survey Methods Simen Oestmo and Curtis W. Marean Institute of Human Origins, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA Introduction The transdisciplinary project centered on Pinna- cle Point (the South African Coast Paleoclimate, Paleoenvironment, Paleoecology, and Paleoan- thropology Project-SACP4) has as its primary goal to develop an integrated paleoclimate, paleoenvironmental, and paleoanthropological record for the south coast of South Africa span- ning 400 to 30 ka, a time that spans the origins of modern humans. The African Middle Stone Age (MSA), a Middle and Late Pleistocene stone tool phase, dominates the majority of this time span. The MSA in South Africa has gained increasing attention in debates about the antiquity of modern human behavior; some researchers arguing that the South African evidence suggests an early origin of modern behavior, while others suggesting a late origin. Resolution of these debates relies on two advances: improvements in our theoretical approach and an improvement of the empirical record in Africa. Fieldwork was initiated at Pinnacle Point (Mossel Bay, South Africa) to improve the empirical record (Marean et al. 2004). Key Issues/Current Debates/Future Directions/Examples Strategy The field strategy uses state-of-the-art excavation and survey methods and techniques to obtain precise and accurate data, relying as much as possible on digital data acquisition integrated into 3D models of the “paleoscape.” The paleoscape is a seamless model of land and sea that projects hunter-gatherer food resources at different climate states. We model that paleoscape with integrations of sea level and coastline change joined to species distribution modeling. A specific part of the transdisciplinary strategy is to use speleothem records to generate long, continuous, and tightly dated paleoclimatic and paleoenvironmental sequences for the MSA combined with other techniques (e.g., faunal change, phytoliths, magnetics) that enrich the environmental reconstructions. Survey Method and Program Pedestrian and mountain-climbing reconnais- sance techniques revealed sites along the cliffs at Pinnacle Point. Today, wooden staircases and walkways provide access to most of the sites (Fig. 1). We use total stations to map all sites Pinnacle Point: Excavation and Survey Methods 5955 P P