Modern Plant Checklists for Ten Middle Stone Age Archaeological Sites of the Western and Eastern Cape, South Africa

This dataset provides plant checklists generated from data recorded over the last ~200 years and curated by the South African National Biodiversity Institute. The data was collected and organised to identify species growing within roughly day-range, home-range and regional foraging tiers around ten archaeological sites with Middle Stone Age deposits in the Western and Eastern Cape provinces of South Africa. It forms part of a larger project about Stone Age phyto-fitness landscapes of southern Africa. The data provide modern vegetation inventories as catalyst for exploring the phyto-fitness potential of certain landscapes in terms foodplants, fuelwood, medicinal and other useful plants. Archaeo-botanical remains, archaeo-botanical surveys and palaeo-climatic data can be used to assess, strengthen and/or constrain the resulting hypotheses.