Middle and Later Stone Age land use and lithic technology in the Eyasi Basin, Tanzania

In this dissertation, I examine Middle Stone Age (MSA)/Middle Paleolithic (MP) and Later Stone Age (LSA)/Upper Paleolithic (UP) behaviors as reflected by the spatial distributions of artifacts across the Eyasi Basin landscape, lithic raw material procurement and use, and lithic reduction sequences. The surface archaeological survey has found MSA and LSA artifacts occurring together in twelve of the fourteen surveyed areas. Also, the test excavations show that where the archaeological deposits are deep, both MSA and LSA artifacts occur with the latter stratified above the former. These indicate that MSA and LSA hominids of the Eyasi Basin may have had similar land-use systems.;The analyses of lithic raw material types show a localized pattern of raw material procurement and use for both MSA and LSA hominids. This indicates that LSA hominids of the Eyasi Basin were no more mobile than their ancestors. Also the results of lithic technological analysis show that important aspects of the organization of lithic technology do not appear to have significantly changed between the MSA and LSA hominids in the Eyasi Basin. The conclusion reached is that in terms of land-use systems and lithic raw material procurement and use, the human boundary that separates "pre-modern" MSA hominids from "modern" hominids is not there--at least in the Eyasi Basin.;Other important discoveries of the research include: (1) the vast richness of the Eyasi Basin for innumerable potential long-term as well as short-term/low budget research projects; (2) that Hadzabe foragers (hunter-gatherers) in the Eyasi Basin have the potential for generating not only analogs for interpreting forager's archaeological patterns, but also for developing explicit arguments for the linkage of ethnoarchaeology to the theoretical or epistemological framework of archaeology; (3) that the Eyasi Basin is ecologically fragile and insecure; and (4) the survival of Hadzabe foragers as a cultural group is nowhere in sight if present conditions continue.