Abstract
Panga ya Saidi is a large, open-roofed, solutional cave located in the Dzitsoni limestone hills that run parallel to the Kenyan coast, approximately halfway between Mombasa and Malindi (3.67° S, 39.74° E) (Fig. 1). The location of the site is of significance since Panga ya Saidi is a rare near-coastal Stone Age site, with most archaeological investigations centering on the Rift zone of eastern Africa. The steep drop-off of the continental shelf in this region ensures that the cave would never have been more than 20 km from the coast during the Late Pleistocene and Holocene occupation of the site.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Blinkhorn, J., & Grove, M. (2018). The structure of the Middle Stone Age of eastern Africa. Quaternary Science Reviews, 195, 1–20.
Bousman, C. B., & Brink, J. S. (2018). The emergence, spread, and termination of the Early Later Stone Age event in South Africa and southern Namibia. Quaternary International, 495, 116–135.
Crowther, A., Lucas, L., Helm, R., Horton, M., Shipton, C., Wright, H. T., et al. (2016). Ancient crops provide first archaeological signature of the westward Austronesian expansion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 113, 6635–6640.
Crowther, A., Prendergast, M. E., Fuller, D. Q., & Boivin, N. (2018). Subsistence mosaics, forager-farmer interactions, and the transition to food production in eastern Africa. Quaternary International, 489, 101–120.
Culley, C., Janzen, A., Brown, S., Prendergast, M. E., Shipton, C., Ndiema, E., Petrgalia, M. D., Boivin, N., & Crowther, A. (2021). Iron Age hunting and herding in coastal eastern Africa: ZooMS identification of domesticates and wild bovids at Panga ya Saidi, Kenya. Journal of Archaeological Science. in press.
d'Errico, F., Pitarch Marti, A., Shipton, C., Le Vraux, E., Petraglia, M., & Boivin, N. (2020). Trajectories of Middle to Later Stone Age cultural innovation in eastern Africa: Personal ornaments, bone artifacts and ocher from Panga ya Saidi, Kenya. Journal of Human Evolution, 141, 102737.
Helm, R., Crowther, A., Shipton, C., Tengeza, A., Fuller, D., & Boivin, N. (2012). Exploring agriculture, interaction and trade on the eastern African littoral: Preliminary results from Kenya. Azania, 47(1), 39–63.
Pargeter, J. (2016). Lithic miniaturization in Late Pleistocene southern Africa. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 10, 221–236.
Pargeter, J., & Shea, J. J. (2019). Going big versus going small: Lithic miniaturization in hominin lithic technology. Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews, 28(2), 72–85.
Prendergast, M. E., Buckley, M., Crowther, A., Frantz, L., Eager, H., Lebrasseur, O., et al. (2017). Reconstructing Asian faunal introductions to eastern Africa from multi-proxy biomolecular and archaeological datasets. PLoS One, 12(8), e0182565.
Roberts, P., Prendergast, M., Janzen, A., Shipton, C., Blinkhorn, J., Zech, J., et al. (2020). Late Pleistocene to Holocene human palaeoecology in the tropical environments of coastal eastern Africa. Paleogeography, Paleoclimatology, Paleoecology, 537, 109438.
Shipton, C., Blinkhorn, J., Archer, W., Kourampas, N., Roberts, P., Prendergast, M. E., et al. (2020). Middle to Later Stone Age lithic technology from Panga ya Saidi, in the tropical coastal forest of East Africa. Journal of Human Evolution, 153, 102954.
Shipton, C., Helm, R., Boivin, N., Crowther, A., Austin, P., & Fuller, D. (2013). Intersections, networks and the genesis of social complexity on the Nyali Coast of East Africa. African Archaeological Review, 30, 427–453.
Shipton, C., Roberts, P., Archer, W., Armitage, S. J., Bita, C., Blinkhorn, J., et al. (2018). 78,000-year-old record of Middle and Later Stone Age innovation in an East African tropical forest. Nature Communications, 9(1), 1832.
Skoglund, P., Thompson, J. C., Prendergast, M. E., Mittnik, A., Sirak, K., Hajdinjak, M., et al. (2017). Reconstructing prehistoric African population structure. Cell, 171, 59–71.
Soper, R. (1975). Notes on some caves in Kilifi district. Cave Exploration Group of East Africa, 5, 38–40.
Stewart, B. A., Zhao, Y., Mitchell, P. J., Dewar, G., Gleason, J. D., & Blum, J. D. (2020). Ostrich eggshell bead strontium isotopes reveal persistent macroscale social networking across late Quaternary Southern Africa. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 117(12), 6453–6462.
Wang, K., Goldstein, S., Bleasdale, M., Clist, B., Bostoen, K., Bakwa-Lufu, P., et al. (2020). Ancient genomes reveal complex patterns of population movement, interaction and replacement in sub-Saharan Africa. Science Advances, 6, eaaz0183.
Acknowledgments
Funding for the excavations at Panga ya Saidi was provided by the Sealinks project under a European Research Council grant (no. 206148; awarded to N.B.), and the Max Planck Society. Permission to conduct the research was granted from the National Commission for Science, Technology and Innovation, Kenya. We are grateful to the staff of the National Museums of Kenya for their ongoing collaboration and to the local custodians of Panga ya Saidi for facilitating our work there.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Shipton, C., Boivin, N., Petraglia, M. (2023). Panga ya Saidi, Kenya. In: Beyin, A., Wright, D.K., Wilkins, J., Olszewski, D.I. (eds) Handbook of Pleistocene Archaeology of Africa . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20290-2_42
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20290-2_42
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-20289-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-20290-2
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)