MODERN BEHAVIOUR AT KLASIES RIVER

摘要

Klasies River produced a body of data that has received much attention in debates on modern behaviour. The different interpretations of the cultural material mirror the way thinking on modern behaviour has developed over the past three decades. The archaeological traits associated with the Upper Palaeolithic were previously considered the standard for inferring modern behaviour. Much older well-dated and well-provenanced artefacts from Africa that are modern by Upper Palaeolithic standards necessitated re-evaluation of this model. Current theoretical developments on modern behaviour aim to link archaeology to symbolic lifeways. Art and ornamentation, together with arbitrary conventions persisting over time and space have been identified as suitable symbolic criteria to infer modern behaviour. Here I discuss why the cultural expressions at Klasies River reflect flexible conventionalized thinking for which the biological substrate may have developed in the Middle Pleistocene.