Excavations at a hunter-gatherer site known as 'Grootrif G' shell midden, Lamberts Bay, Western Cape Province

Since excavations at Elands Bay Cave thirty years ago, a small number of nearby sites were excavated in the late 1970s and early 1980s in order to provide complementary observations to those made from this large shelter (Horwitz 1979; Klein & Cruz-Uribe 1987; Manhire 1987; Noli 1988; Parkington & Poggenpoel 1987; Robey 1987). In the midst of these studies, Parkington et al. (1986) explored the nature of the impact of pastoralism on local hunter-gatherer populations by attempting to integrate various lines of evidence, a topic revived later with a rock art perspective and additional quantified data by Yates et al. (1994)