Renewed Investigations into the Middle Stone Age of northern Malawi

The rich Middle Stone Age deposits in the Karonga District of northern Malawi were first investigated by J. Desmond Clark and colleagues in the 1960’s. This work demonstrated the enormous potential of the area, but further studies were hindered by difficulties in dating the sites and understanding their fine-scale depositional and palaeoenvironmental contexts. With the advances that have been made in these fields over the last fifty years, the time is ideal to renew these investigations. Recent research has shown that this area preserves a record of Middle Stone Age behaviour that can be paired with existing palaeoenvironmental data from Lake Malawi cores to test a series of hypotheses about early modern human demographic and technological change in response to fluctuating climatic conditions.