Chapter 3 Technological Change and the Importance of Variability: The Western Cape of South Africa from MIS 6-2 Alex Mackay Abstract The South African Cape provides important evidence of behavioral and technological complexity in the period from MIS 6-2. Understanding the meaning of discontinuous temporal patterns in the distribution of technological systems is hampered by traditional culture historic approaches and culture evolutionary interpretations. These historical effects lead to depictions of the past as a series of stadial, progressive units. Evidence of variability is commonly suppressed and presumptions about what makes a technology advantageous go unquestioned. In this paper, key data used to generate existing stadial systems are considered from four sites in the Western Cape. Data are presented using the maximum available stratigraphic reso- lution within the constraints of the excavation systems used. Variability is shown to be a recurrent feature of technolog- ical systems. Rather than a series of discrete packages of innovation, technological change in this area is better understood in terms of the differential persistence of continually generated variation. The resulting picture is one of technologically flexible groups adapting rapidly and in some cases dramatically to changing circumstances through the Late Pleistocene. Keywords South Africa Á Western Cape Á Lithic Tech- nological Variability Introduction The Cape coastal and hinterland regions of South Africa feature prominently in discussions of human history and in particular in debates about the origins of behaviors distinctive of modern people. Rock shelter sites in these regions often preserve rich archives of archaeological material covering much of the period from MIS 6-2. Finds such as shell beads (Henshilwood et al. 2004;d’Errico et al. 2005, 2008), bone implements (Henshilwood and Sealy 1997; Henshilwood et al. 2001a; Backwell et al. 2008) and engraved fragments of ochre and ostrich eggshell (Henshilwood et al. 2002, 2009, 2014; Mackay and Welz 2008; Texier et al. 2010) have reshaped our understanding of human behaviors in these early periods, though such finds remain relatively infrequent components of pre-MIS 2 assemblages. Abundant, however, is evidence for the use of complex stone artifact technologies. These include the production of blades and bifacial points, the latter worked by soft hammer and possibly by pressure (Mourre et al. 2010; Hogberg and Larrson 2011), backed artifacts of a variety of forms, but most notably crescent- or segment-shaped pieces, and unifacial points. Stone selection patterns changed considerably, with some stone types pref- erentially sought despite increased acquisition costs (Mackay and Marwick 2011). There is also evidence for the use of heat treatment to alter the mechanical properties of flaked rocks at this time (Brown et al. 2009; Schmidt et al. 2013). Interest- ingly, the proliferation of implement types such as backed artifacts and bifacial points, along with the preferential selection of fine-grained rocks appears to be quite short-lived (Jacobs et al. 2008). This has led to the characterization of certain periods as unusually innovative, with attendant con- jecture regarding the causes of both the appearance of tech- nological complexity and its apparent subsequent demise (Jacobs and Roberts 2009; Powell et al. 2009; Chase 2010; Henshilwood and Dubreuil 2011). Inhibiting our understanding of these issues are histori- cally embedded assumptions about the factors underlying technological change. These affect the ways in which tech- nological changes are presented and explained. This paper begins by considering the roles of culture history and culture A. Mackay (&) Centre for Archaeological Science, School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Wollongong, Northfields Avenue, Wollongong, NSW 2522, Australia e-mail: mackay.ac@gmail.com © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016 Sacha C. Jones and Brian A. Stewart (eds.), Africa from MIS 6-2: Population Dynamics and Paleoenvironments, Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology, DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-7520-5_3 49