A Technological and Use-Wear Analysis of Worked Bones from Twyfelpoort Rock Shelter, Eastern Free State, South Africa

Twyfelpoort rock shelter is a Later Stone Age hunter-gatherer site in the central interior of South Africa that witnessed late contact with Bantu- and Afrikaans-speaking farmers. This paper builds on a growing corpus of research that explores the degree to which contact with immigrant cultures and technologies influenced and altered the traditional bone working technology of autochthonous hunter-gatherers. I show that while the incidence of bone working declines after contact, the manufacturing technology remains consistent through time and corresponds to what we see at other contact-period Later Stone Age sites. The most notable change is a decline in ornamentation and an apparent increase in expediency – bone tools appear generally to have been used for shorter durations after contact as compared to before.