Qualla: Elands Bay Cave

Elands Bay Cave: Introduction

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrew Hall, CC BY-SA 3.0. The seals came in winter and spring, hauling themselves onto the rocks near the mouth of the Verlorenvlei estuary. The people who lived in the cave above knew this. They timed their presence accordingly, arriving when the seal pups were young and accessible, building fires against the cave walls, cracking mussel shells, and leaving behind the bones, tools, and ash that would accumulate for millennia. Elands Bay Cave, on the Atlantic coast of South Africa's Western Cape, is not the oldest archaeological site in the region, but it may be one of the most revealing -- a place where the relationship between people, animals, climate, and coastline can be read in layers of earth and bone.

Read more: Elands Bay Cave on Qualla

Image: Andrew Hall | CC BY-SA 3.0

Elands Bay Cave: Parkington's Excavations

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit gbaku, CC BY-SA 2.0. Archaeologist John Parkington began excavating Elands Bay Cave in the 1970s, and his work transformed understanding of Later Stone Age coastal communities in the Western Cape. Parkington's approach was comparative -- he systematically analyzed different types of evidence against ...

Read more: Elands Bay Cave on Qualla

Image: gbaku | CC BY-SA 2.0

Elands Bay Cave: What the Seal Bones Tell

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit gbaku, CC BY-SA 2.0. Seal mandibles recovered from the cave were compared to reference collections at the South Africa Museum and the Department of Sea Fisheries. In the upper layers, the evidence pointed clearly to seasonal hunting: seals were taken during winter and spring, suggesting that people p...

Read more: Elands Bay Cave on Qualla

Image: gbaku | CC BY-SA 2.0

Elands Bay Cave: Forty Cubic Meters of Shells

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit gbaku, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Holocene layers of the cave contained approximately 40 cubic meters of shell middens -- enormous accumulations of mussel shells, ostrich eggshell fragments, and other marine shells that represent thousands of meals eaten over thousands of years. Beyond the organic remains, th...

Read more: Elands Bay Cave on Qualla

Image: gbaku | CC BY-SA 2.0

Elands Bay Cave: A Coast That Would Not Stay Still

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit gbaku, CC BY-SA 2.0. The climate around Elands Bay has grown continuously drier since the Late Pleistocene, and the coastline has shifted dramatically with changes in sea level. The archaeological record in the cave captures these transformations. Charcoal analysis reveals changes in vegetation -- th...

Read more: Elands Bay Cave on Qualla

Image: gbaku | CC BY-SA 2.0