(1958) in particular took pains to avoid adopting a Euro-biased terminology that would imply far-flung correlations that could not be demonstrated. It is not possible to force South African Paleolithic prehistory into the tripartite European divisions, not the least because there is no equivalent of the Upper Paleolithic represented in sub-Saharan Africa. The later Stone Age of southern Africa is Epipaleolithic, not Upper Paleolithic, in character.

A further legacy of the Goodwin and van Riet Lowe publication is the terms derived from the names of places where type or reference collections were found. The type site name is conventionally used as a label to identify similar artifacts at other sites, the underlying assumption being that differences in artifacts denoted peoples of different cultures, languages, or tribes. It is now known that much of the variability in the stone artifacts had to do with time-successive innovations and that at any one time, similar artifacts were made over much of southern Africa. The archaeological record, for the most part, is too coarse to distinguish social or linguistic groupings. Some labels continue to be used as an archaeological convenience, and considerable effort has been expended in redefining such terms and understanding what implications they carry.

Goodwin and van Riet Lowe had no means of establishing anything other than the relative ages of the stages they recognized from the somewhat meager stratigraphic information at their disposal. At least collections and archaeological sites could be ordered in a gross chronological sense. The later Stone Age was thought to date to the last 2,000 years, with the middle Stone Age extending back perhaps a further 2,000 years. It was not until the advent of radiocarbon dating in the 1950s that more precise estimates of age ranges could be obtained. The radiocarbon revolution when combined with other dating techniques has shown that the guessed ages of these pioneers were out by a factor of at least ten. Thus, 21,000 years is a better estimate for the duration of the later Stone Age than their guess of 2,000 years, while the middle Stone Age may have begun as much as 250,000 years ago.

The two men were the dominant figures in South African archaeology from the 1920s to the 1950s. Goodwin carried out extensive fieldwork in Western Cape Province in the 1930s, notably at the site of Oakhurst (Goodwin 1938) and Cape St. Blaize Cave (Goodwin and Malan 1935) at Mossel Bay. These excavations were aimed at investigating the divisions of the middle and later Stone Ages. After the interruption of World War II, Goodwin devoted himself more to the promotion of archaeology through the founding of the South African Archaeological Society in 1946 and editing the South African Archaeological Bulletin, the main publication of the society. This journal published material on the archaeology of different regions in sub-Saharan Africa.

Van Riet Lowe became director of the Archaeological Survey in South Africa and, apart from being the spokesperson for archaeological concerns in the country, he made a major contribution through his studies of the Acheulean gravel deposits of the Vaal River (van Riet Lowe 1952). He died in 1957, a year after his retirement, and Goodwin died in 1959. In two short years, South African archaeology lost its two leading authorities.

Coming of Age

The Archaeological Survey in South Africa was disbanded in 1962, and one of Goodwin’s former students who had worked in the survey, B.D. Malan, became secretary of the Historical Monuments Commission, a forerunner of the National Monument Council and the present South African Heritage Resources Agency. Another of Goodwin’s students, R.J. Mason, became the founding staff member of a new Department of Archaeology at the University of the Witwatersrand. In 1960, Goodwin’s teaching position at the University of Cape Town was filled by R.R. Inskeep, who was initially responsible for training a number of students to fill new posts as they became available.

The economic boom of the 1960s saw archaeology, worldwide, enter a growth phase, and the same was true in South Africa. New posts were created in museums and universities, and from a complement of some 6 professionals