Phytoliths in modern plants and soils from Klasies River, Cape Region (South Africa) Alice Novello a, *, 1 , Marion K. Bamford a , Yvette van Wijk b , Sarah Wurz a, c a Evolutionary Studies Institute and School of Geoscience, University of the Witwatersrand (WITS), P. Bag 3, 2050, Johannesburg, South Africa b Botany Department, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa c School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental studies, University of the Witwatersrand (WITS), P. Bag 3, 2050, Johannesburg, South Africa article info Article history: Received 12 May 2017 Received in revised form 15 September 2017 Accepted 5 October 2017 Available online 17 October 2017 Keywords: Silica Restionaceae Thicket Archaeology Paleoenvironment abstract The archaeological site of Klasies River is famous for the richness of its Middle Stone Age deposits, which offer the opportunity to document behaviors of early modern humans in Africa, as well as the paleo- environmental context of their occupation of the area during the late Pleistocene. The Main Site deposits (dated to ca. 115 to 55 ka) include botanical remains such as seeds and charcoal, which suggests that micro-plant particles like phytoliths could also have been deposited. Yet, no phytolith reference collec- tion based on both modern plant and soil material has been produced for Klasies River, which compli- cates attempts of phytolith analysis of the site's deposits. One of our challenges was therefore to initiate a new and comprehensive phytolith reference collection of modern plants and soils occurring today in the vicinity of Klasies. For this purpose, we processed phytoliths from 24 modern plant specimens and 16 soil samples from different vegetation patches, all located today in a perimeter <5 km 2 around the Main Site. Our analyses indicate that ovate/orbicular and/or tabular polygonal phytoliths are the most recurrent and abundant morphotypes (>53% and up to 94%) produced in the leaf tissues of the Anacardiaceae, Aster- aceae, Celastraceae, Ericaceae, Proteaceae, and Vitaceae species we studied, which are all eudicotyle- doneous taxa. Regarding the Cyperaceae, Restionaceae, and one of the Proteaceae species (Leucadendron spissifolium, a fynbos shrub), they each produce distinct phytolith assemblages: the Restionaceae leaf/ culm assemblage is dominated by psilate and decorated globular/spheroid phytoliths (94%), whereas the Cyperaceae leaf/culm content and the Proteaceae leaf content are both dominated by silicified papillae (-like) bodies (54% and 63%, respectively). Besides, both globular/spheroid and papillae (-like) phytoliths account for 34% and 8% in the fynbos soil collected. Our analyses also show that ovate/orbicular and/or polygonal phytoliths occur in very small amounts (<2%) in modern soils of the area although they are numerous in most of the eudicotyledoneous leaf tissues we analyzed. Conversely, grass silica short cell phytoliths are found abundantly in the soils collected in close proximity to the Main Site (>66%), where grasses do however occur sparsely in the current vegetation. © 2017 Elsevier Ltd and INQUA. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction The archaeological site of Klasies River (34  6 0 29.69 00 S, 24  23 0 25.95 00 E) consists of a series of distinct caves distributed along the coast of the Indian Ocean, in the western part of the Eastern Cape Region in South Africa. The Main Site is made of two open-air caves and two overhangs (Wurz, 2008) that were filled and emptied numerous times with the rise and fall of sea-levels during interglacial and glacial times in the late Pleistocene (Wurz, 2002). Sea regression stages notably allowed humans to settle many times at the site, and this resulted in alternating occupation and non-occupation deposits inside and between the two caves (Deacon, 2008). About 20 m of middens including numerous re- mains of food debris (e.g., bones, shells), artefacts, and fire hearths were deposited between 115 and 55 ka (Vogel, 2001; Wurz, 2002). Klasies River is especially famous for its very well-preserved, abundant, and diverse tools of the Middle Stone Age (Singer and Wymer, 1982; Wurz, 2002) and also evidence for complex behav- iours (Wurz, 2013). This is suggested, for example, by the * Corresponding author. E-mail address: novelloalice@gmail.com (A. Novello). 1 Present address: Department of Biology and the Burke Museum of Natural Historyand Culture, University of 19 Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195, USA. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Quaternary International journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/quaint https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2017.10.009 1040-6182/© 2017 Elsevier Ltd and INQUA. All rights reserved. Quaternary International 464 (2018) 440e459