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The Early Middle Stone Age (EMSA) of southern Africa represents a poorly defined period in terms of chronology, palaeoenvironments, subsistence strategies and technological traditions. This lack of understanding is directly related to the low number of EMSA deposits that have been excavated, but concomitantly, it also reflects the poor interest accorded by most of the recent archaeological projects. In this context, the excavation that we undertook at Elands Bay Cave (EBC) in the West Coast of South Africa in 2011 provides a good opportunity to discuss the oldest occupations at the site, which have been assigned to the 'MSA 1' by T. Volman (1981) and which purportedly belong to the earliest MSA traditions of southern Africa. In the present paper, we provide a technological study of the 'MSA 1' lithic assemblage. Our results demonstrate the near-exclusive use of local quartzite by the inhabitants of EBC. This raw material was preferentially selected in the form of slabs and large flakes to produce blanks that were used without further retouching. We identified various reduction sequences that we unify under a concept referred to as 'POL-reduction strategy'. Furthermore, we perform intersite technological comparisons and conclude that on technological grounds the 'MSA 1' of Elands Bay Cave dates back to MIS 6, in agreement with the luminescence dating. We acknowledge current difficulties in building a chrono-cultural framework at a subcontinental scale. Thus, we discuss the relevance of the term 'MSA 1' and instead advocate a more neutral and generic label of 'EMSA' (understood here as late Middle Pleistocene MSA technologies). The analysis of the EMSA of EBC sheds new light on the patterns and changes that characterise behaviours and organisations of Anatomically Modern Humans over the last 200 ka. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elands Bay Cave (EBC) is one of the key sites for the analysis of the Late Pleistocene/Holocene record in southern Africa. It typifies an area of study, the West Coast of South Africa, which benefits from a long history of research, from the 1960s until today. The 2011 project of EBC was initiated within the framework of the Middle Stone Age (MSA) research at Diepkloof Rock Shelter (DRS). The objective was to build a local synthesis and a complementary picture on the basis of these two sites located 14 km apart from one another, on the left bank of the Verlorenvlei. The excavation at EBC took place during May 2011 with the aim of clarifying the site formation processes, the chronology of the Late Pleistocene occupations as well as the nature of the technological sequence. Our excavation focused on a 1.2 m deep profile that records two main occupational phases separated by a significant hiatus: (1) the initial phase represents an early MSA technology (previously called 'MSA 1' by T. Volman 1981) within deposits that started accumulating ca. 250 ka years ago; (2) the second phase documents (late) MSA, Early Later Stone Age (ELSA) and Robberg occupations. The present synthesis is part of a series of several papers that take a multidisciplinary perspective. In this paper, we introduce our 2011 excavation, present our main results and discuss the succession from the late MSA to the LSA at EBC. In an epilogue, we provide a comparison between the archaeological records of EBC and DRS and further explore the reasons why these two sites do not represent similar occupational sequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]