Preface The Middle Stone Age at Die Kelders Cave 1, South Africa Curtis W. Marean Department of Anthropology, SUNY at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY 11794-4364, U.S.A. E-mail: curtis.marean@sunysb.edu Journal of Human Evolution (2000) 38, 3–5 Article No. jhev.1999.0348 Available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on South Africa continues to be one of several regions holding center stage in investiga- tions targeting the origins of modern humans. The significance of South Africa derives from several facts. South Africa has several areas with geologic and hydrologic contexts conducive to the formation of caves and rockshelters, and the preservation of fauna. There is a small but growing sample of hominid specimens that resemble anatomically modern humans, found in association with Middle Stone Age (MSA) artefacts. There are at least two MSA lithic entities (Howieson’s Poort and Stillbay) that have incongruous mixes of archaic and more derived tool forms and technologies. Finally, there is a rich published literature on the archaeology of South Africa, resulting from a long history of high quality scientific investigation. Despite the rich MSA record in South Africa, there are still too few MSA sites that have been excavated with modern methods and that preserve good artefactual and faunal sequences. DK1 is an exception: the original excavator, Franz Schweitzer, excavated carefully, screened all the material, and saved all lithics and fauna without regard to its identifiability. Unfortu- nately, Schweitzer died before he could complete publication of his MSA exavations at DK1, leaving many aspects of the site and its contents an enigma to the scientific com- munity. The rich samples of artefacts, fauna, and hominids from Schweitzer’s excavations were studied by a variety of researchers. Their results answered many questions, but also identified several problems that could only be resolved by further excavation at DK1, followed by renewed studies of the finds. These problems established our research objectives for the project, and are discussed below. General stratigraphic descriptions and interpretations of Schweitzer’s excavations have been published, but there was no detailed layer by layer description of the sequence describing the horizontal and vertical character of the strata. Also, Schweitzer’s excavations had occurred in a relatively small area near the eastern wall of the cave, and it was unknown if this area was characteristic of the entire cave. In the first paper we document the vertical and hori- zontal character of this complex strati- graphic record. We found that, while all of the strata documented by Schweitzer are present throughout a wider horizontal exposure, the character of various layers changes from east to west, and diagenetic disturbances were less severe toward the center of the cave. Prior publications on the DK1 sediments raised several questions, including the nature of diagenetic change and anthro- pogenic contribution to the sediments. Goldberg’s paper addresses this problem by combining substantial experience in cave deposits with an application of the micro- morphology technique. Micromorphology still remains something of a mystery to the uninitiated archaeologist and physical 0047–2484/00/010003+03$35.00/0  2000 Academic Press