The Jojosi Shelter Excavation Project – Understanding prehistoric land-use and raw material provisioning in southeastern South Africa

01.07.2026 bis 29.02.2028

The central goal of this 20-month project is to investigate how modern human hunter-gatherer groups from the Middle Stone Age and Later Stone Age, as well as later Iron Age communities, used the site of Jojosi Shelter (KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa) and structured their mobility within the local settlement pattern of the Jojosi Dongas and the regional context of the Thukela Basin. In this context, the project examines how far the organization of technology, mobility, and land use changed through time and across different subsistence strategies. The work packages encompass new excavations at the site of Jojosi Shelter, analysis of the recovered lithic assemblages, chronometric dating and regional contextualization.