Reconcilable differences: Using retrospective photogrammetry to bridge the divide between analogue and digital site data collected during long-term excavation projects.

Over the last 30 years, high-resolution site documentation has rapidly developed, with analogue drawings and film photography being replaced with high-precision digital recordings. Today, most archaeological field data sets are produced using digital tools that store spatial and visual information in various digital formats directly, i.e.

New Blombos Cave evidence supports a multistep evolutionary scenario for the culturalization of the human body.

The emergence of technologies to culturally modify the appearance of the human body is a debated issue, with earliest evidence consisting of perforated marine shells dated between 140 and 60 ka at archaeological sites from Africa and western Asia. In this study, we submit unpublished marine and estuarine gastropods from Blombos Cave Middle Stone Age layers to taxonomic, taphonomic, technological, and use-wear analyses. We show that unperforated and naturally perforated eye-catching shells belonging to the species Semicassis zeylanica, Conus tinianus, and another Conus species, possibly Conus algoensis, were brought to the cave between 100 and 73 ka.