GEOPHYTES, GRASSES AND GRINDSTONES: REPLANTING IDEAS OF GATHERING IN SOUTHERN AFRICA'S MIDDLE AND LATER STONE AGES

Hilary Deacon's seminal paper (1993) in the South African Archaeological Bulletin was instrumental in promoting the notion that geophytes, or underground storage organs, were a major target of hunter-gatherer subsistence in the Middle and Later Stone Ages of southern Africa. Summarising an interest developed in earlier work (e.g. Deacon 1976), Deacon's assessment of geophytes as prolific, energy-rich staples of later Pleistocene and Holocene hunter-gatherer subsistence, has also been mirrored in papers concerned with diets potentially supportive of human evolution, The idea that hunter gatherer grindstones are linked to geophyte processing has also gone largely unchallenged, as has the assumption that grass-or small-seed processing is not responsible for their abundance, nor that wild, small-seeded resources ever contributed substantially to hunter-gatherer diets in southern Africa. These arguments have considerable implications for subsistence and economic change in the region. This paper surveys existing archaeological and ethnohistorical literature to (re)assess the importance of the geophyte hypothesis, probe the origin of the linkage between grindstones and geophytes, and determine the extent to which small-seeded resources were utilised. I conclude that although a strong role forgeophytes in southern African hunter-gatherer subsistence is warranted, the need to process them does not best explain the ubiquitous presence of grindstones, for which seed-processing may be a better candidate. That wild grass processing may have been, in contrast to received wisdom, a staple of subsistence, necessarily means that '[what] hunters gathered' should be rethought.