UMMAA curator Brian Stewart has won a Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant of $450,000 (£330,000) for his project "Only the Scatters Remain: A New Approach to Surface Archaeology in Deserts." With colleagues from the UK, Portugal and South Africa, Stewart will help develop new methods to date surface archaeology in drylands. In many deserts, this is the dominant—and sometimes only–evidence archaeologists have to work with. Harnessing recent advances in portable luminescence (pOSL) technologies, surface sites in South Africa’s Karoo Desert with high depositional integrity and age structure will first be identified. Their positions will then be extrapolated to whole landscapes using geomorphic agent-based modeling. Resulting insights will inform probabilistic surface site selection for targeted geochronological (OSL, cosmogenic nuclide and U-series) and archaeological (spatial and typo-technological) analyses. Ultimately, the team hopes to test hypotheses surrounding the role of South Africa’s now-arid interior in the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens. The project builds on recent baseline work undertaken by Stewart and colleagues at a series of large, now-dry Karoo paleo-lakes, published in PNAS and the South African Journal of Science.
