Ostrich eggshell bead attributes and the hunter/herder/pastoralist debate in southern Africa

In southern Africa the size of ostrich eggshell beads has been used to attempt to separate hunter-gatherer from pastoralist sites since the 1980s. This paper offers a revival of the debate with individual bead and aperture diameter measurements and the presentation of a new bead metric — the cup percentage — and a larger spatio-temporal dataset. Preliminary results from late Pleistocene and Holocene Western Cape sites in South Africa show a change in beads after the arrival of domestic livestock. The challenge remains as to how to explain this post-2000 BP change.