EXPLORING CORE REDUCTION PREFERENCES AT PENHILL FARM, LOWER SUNDAYS RIVER VALLEY, SOUTH AFRICA

Sites within the lower Sundays River Valley are helping to character-ise the Acheulean for the south-eastern Cape coastal region of South Africa, primarily through investigations at three newly reported sites: Penhill, Atmar and Bernol Farms. Penhill Farm preserves a large secondary context assemblage that is rich in Earlier Stone Age materials. In two recent publications, the formal tools have been described which illustrate the production of a range of large cutting tools and smaller retouched artefacts, predominantly on flake blanks. A trend identified in both studies is the clear morphological difference in these formal tools by raw material type although shaping and retouch production trends across the different tool types are largely consistent. No detail has yet been provided on the large sample of cores that occur in a range of raw materials. By employing a techno-typological-based approach to investigate core morphometric characteristics, reduction strategies and reduction intensity, we assess whether the differences in these formal tools are related to unique aspects of the core reduction process, or whether they may relate to preexisting raw material properties.