The ‘big questions’ facing scholars of the Neolithic in the Sahara and coastal North Africa continue to be when and how did the Neolithic first emerge in this region? The orthodox view of earlier archaeologists working in the Western Desert of Egypt and bordering areas of Libya was that it was introduced as a package from the Near East, but this is now coming under increasing challenge from new research which points towards a multi-spectrum development involving the exploitation of a combination of local and imported products. For example, in a series of new papers in Quaternary International, Lucarini et al. (Reference Lucarini, Radini, Barton and Barker2016) have suggested that domesticated caprines (sheep/goats) were introduced into North Africa at the end of the ninth millennium cal BP, but there was contact with indigenous people in these areas who were already intensively exploiting a range of wild plant resources including sorghum and other wild grasses. Barich (Reference Barich2016) considers the goat to be the oldest domesticated species arriving from the Near East, but as an addition to and not a replacement for pre-existing wild resources.
A slightly different interpretation is proposed by McDonald (Reference McDonald2016), who sees ‘Neolithisation’ as comprising a loosely connected set of traits, such as animals, ceramics and bifacial working of certain stone tools, which gradually trickled into North Africa over time, to be selectively adopted by local groups. This view is partly shared by Holdaway et al. (Reference Holdaway, Phillipps, Emmitt and Wendrich2015), who generally reject the concept of a Neolithic package and instead see evidence, at least in the Fayum, for newly emerging patterns of behaviour (mobility, food storage and domestic species exploitation) mixed in with a persistence in local traditions of exploiting fish resources. Further west in Libya, domestic caprines appear quite early in the eighth millennium cal BP, but wild plant foods continue to be harvested (Lucarini et al., Reference Lucarini, Radini, Barton and Barker2016). Thus, the very definition of the Neolithic in North Africa is at present undergoing extensive review and it is becoming clear from new field studies that the conditions leading to its emergence may have been both varied and locally distinctive.
To this long-standing debate can now be added a highly informative new volume on the Farafra Oasis. The oasis lies south-west of the Fayum in what has long been known as the Libyan Desert. It is situated 400 km south of the Mediterranean and around 500 km from the Sinai Peninsula and the edges of the Near East. The oasis and the nearby Wadi el Obeiyid have been the subject of an intensive survey and excavation between 1990 and 2005 under the leadership of Professor Barbara Barich of Sapienza University in Rome. In this venture, she has been ably assisted by a formidable list of specialists, many of whom have contributed to this volume. The 29 essays contained in the edited book provide a detailed picture of life in the oasis beginning in the Late Pleistocene, but focusing particularly on the Middle Holocene (between about 7,600 and 6,000 uncal BP) when this area became much wetter than it is today.
The book outlines how Farafra has been intermittently visited by humans since the Early and Middle Stone Ages (Van Peer, Chapter 2). During the Early Holocene (c. 9,000 uncal BP), it was used as a source of raw materials with a series of workshop sites where cherts were actively quarried and stone tools manufactured by mobile groups of hunter-gatherers. Occupation at this time would have been limited by the seasonal availability of water with ephemeral refilling of local lakes and pools. Following this phase, the climate seems to have become moister in the Middle Holocene, facilitated by a northwards incursion of winter rains. The detailed palaeoclimatic history of this period can be reconstructed from deposits in the El-Bahr and Hidden Valley locations in the oasis (Hamdan, Chapters 6 and 10). Parallels for this wetter stage can also be found in other parts of the Western Desert from the Great Sand Sea to the Dakhla Oasis. In regions to the south (the Nabta Playa area), it coincides with the early appearance of cattle pastoralists, but the spread of cattle seems to have been limited to the southern half of the Egyptian Western Desert (from the latitude of Dakhla southwards), and there is no similar evidence forthcoming from Farafra.
The availability of secure dating evidence at Farafra shows that the Early Holocene humid phase was followed soon afterwards by a return to more arid conditions around 8,000 uncal BP when occupation was largely confined to the deepest parts of the basins. Further prolonged wetting of the climate from 7,600 to 6,000 uncal BP coincided with some of the more profound changes in human adaptation in the Holocene. For example, during this phase small sub-circular hearths are found full of charred sorghum grains and, interestingly, a mandible of sheep/goat securely dated to 7,251 ± 67 uncal BP (R-2454). This, as the authors point out, is the earliest example of a domesticated caprine from the area, and one of the oldest in the whole of North Africa. The archaeological finds for this period are well described and illustrated in Chapter 11 (subdivided into specialist reports). One of the great novelties to be highlighted in these chapters is the presence of clusters of stone slab structures from the Hidden Valley, the dates of which fall mainly between 7,200 and 6,800 uncal BP and which are equated with dwellings of a semi-permanent settlement or village (Barich, Chapter 11/1). The assemblage of charred plants found in the Hidden Valley village also provides some of the most spectacular evidence for the use of food sources in this part of North Africa (Fahmy, Chapter 12; Lucarini, Chapter 13), which includes many types of wild grasses and sorghum (grains and spikelets) in association with grinding stones. The occurrence of caprines (Gautier, Chapter 14) from the same sites confirms that goat/sheep herding formed a mixed economy with the foraging of wild plants. In these levels were also found bifacially retouched tools which the authors do not believe have closest parallels with the Near East, but are more directly associated with central and northern areas of the Egyptian Desert and as far north as the Marmarican and Cyrenaican coasts (Barich, Chapter 11/2; Lucarini, Chapter 11/3 and 11/4). Thus, one of the key findings of this work is that, in the period 7,600 to 6,000 uncal BP, there was a prolonged presence of humans, marked by a proliferation of sites in the playa basins and the existence of substantial dwelling structures implying that populations in these areas had reached a considerable size before 6,800 uncal BP. The existence of possibly high-status goods (bifacial stone tools and ostrich eggshell) may indicate specialist craft exchange, but only within the context of a ‘forager-herder’ economy with no other significant changes in lifestyle. It is also interesting to note in passing that these early developments did not lead inexorably towards a more settled Neolithic village life. Instead, there are clear signs that, after 6,800 uncal BP, dwelling structures were flimsier and that human groups again became more mobile and perhaps only visited Farafra on a seasonal basis (in the dry season when other water sources were scarce).
In all, this is an excellent volume, lavishly illustrated and full of much interesting new detail covering dynamic phases of the Holocene, when the climate fluctuated rapidly between dry and humid conditions. The results of the long-term research project have allowed the authors to identify major changes in the nature of occupation of the oasis and to situate them within the framework of the physical environment. They show that while there was no uniform development towards a Neolithic way of life, and that differences existed between cultures on the Nile and the Sahara, there was also considerable regional continuity across the Western Desert. The publication of this volume adds another vital piece to the jigsaw puzzle concerning how and when the Neolithic emerged in these areas.
