ABSTRACT
Early Homo colonised the exposed landmass of the Sunda continental shelf by the early Pleistocene, and may have negotiated narrow sea crossings to reach Flores by the middle Pleistocene. More extended consideration of the Leang Sakapao chronology is warranted in light of the dating material used. In an attempt to gauge the amount of radiometrically dead carbon which may have been ingested into the Leang Sakapao Brotia shell, live shell from the local stream (collected in 1996) was submitted to the Waikato Lab. The archaeological manifestation of this process, in inland sites away from the major rivers, would be abandonment or drastically reduced site use at the approach of the Last Glacial Maximum. By providing a second window on Pleistocene life in this region Leang Sakapao 1 has allowed the reader to develop models of hunter-gatherer economic change before and during the Last Glacial Maximum. .
