Semi-permanent foragers in semi-arid environments of North Africa

Semi-permanent foragers in semi-aridenvironments of North Africa

Elena A. A. Garcea

Abstract

Early Holocene foragers in North Africa provide unique responses to adaptational patterns of non-

agricultural societies and they can offer intriguing answers to questions regarding relationshipsbetween sedentism, economy and sociocultural complexity. Three points are of major relevance forunderstanding late foragers in North Africa: first, fishing, sustained by reduced mobility, was acommon practice at sites located along perennial rivers, such as the Nile, or seasonal watercourses

(wadis); second, the successive shift to a food-producing economy implied the acquisition of nomadicpastoralism; third, agriculture has never been a feasible economic practice in desert and peri-desertenvironments. The practice of fishing and the scarcity of moist lands away from watercourses

encouraged more permanent settlement of sites by the water, which offered nutritional resources toplants, animals, as well as humans. The combination of these economic adjustments andenvironmental conditions favoured social organizations based on continual occupations of semi-

permanent settlements and led to a population increase, which – in turn – triggered the rise ofsociocultural complexity and new technological productions, such as pottery and groundstone,before the adoption of any form of food production.

This paper presents the socioeconomic dynamics of Early Holocene foragers in North Africa andoffers examples from the Central Sahara and the Upper Nile Valley, where the author has conductedresearch for almost two decades.

Keywords

North Africa; Libya; Sudan; delayed-return economy; fishing; pottery.

Introduction

The ‘Neolithic package’ is often seen as the necessary kit for a successful transition

from hunting-gathering to food production. Within this framework, climatic change,

population pressure, broad-spectrum resource acquisition and reduced mobility are

considered as the interlinked causal factors leading to the domestication of plants and

animals and to the systematic organization of space to form sedentary villages.

World Archaeology Vol. 38(2): 197–219 Sedentism in Non-Agricultural Societies

ª 2006 Taylor & Francis ISSN 0043-8243 print/1470-1375 online

DOI: 10.1080/00438240600693968

This paper aims to challenge the traditional concept of ‘Neolithic package’ by

presenting equally successful patterns that followed alternative trajectories to the classic

Near Eastern model. It begins by reviewing some conventional theories that relate

sedentism to agriculture. It moves on by considering the North African model that

proposes a shift from sedentism as a component of delayed-return strategy by hunter-

gatherers to nomadism as a pastoral ‘Neolithic’ characteristic. It then provides further

support to this theory by discussing the results of the latest investigations that the present

author conducted at Uan Tabu, in the Tadrart Acacus mountain range (south-west

Libya), in the Khartoum Province (central Sudan) and at Sai Island (northern Sudan)

(Fig. 1).

The revolutionary package

According to traditional interpretation, there is no sedentism without agriculture.

Sedentism and agriculture are considered essential interlinked components of the

‘Neolithic package’ which traditionally includes the adoption of agro-pastoral practices

through plant and animal domestication, the production of ceramic vessels and polished

stone tools and the formation of village dwellings. These social, economic and

technological innovations implied such radical changes and advances in past societies

that Childe (1928, 1936) considered them to be actors in the ‘Neolithic revolution’. These

events first appeared in Southwest Asia and later diffused to Europe. As research

proceeded in the ‘Fertile Crescent’, the Mediterranean Basin and other parts of the world,

growing archaeological evidence disputed the validity of the ‘Neolithic package’ even with

Figure 1 Map of sites mentioned in the text.

198 Elena A. A. Garcea

regard to the geographic regions where the package had been conceived. In fact, not all

acquisitions occurred simultaneously and they were not necessarily interlinked. Moreover,

they did not form a compact package consisting of interrelated elements. Each component

had its own origins, causes and consequences that developed independently, without

implying any sudden revolution.

If it seems now appropriate to criticize the concept of ‘Neolithic package’ and ‘Neolithic

revolution’ in the theoretical reasoning, it may be unfair simply to place all the blame on

Childe. It should be remembered that he worked in the 1920s–1940s, when systematic

archaeological excavations were at their beginnings, and therefore lesser evidence was

available. On the other hand, Childe should be acknowledged for having freed

archaeological interpretation from the unilinear evolutionary age/stage system and having

proposed the need to explain cultural change. Childe’s merit is that he introduced a critical

question into the scientific archaeological discourse: ‘why?’ This question implied that

cultural trajectories were not all the same and that local/regional/geographic variability

was the norm rather than the exception. The sad destiny of the ‘revolutionary package’ has

not been the fact that Childe conceived it, but that many other later scholars have

passively adopted this concept conceived over seventy years ago.

Sedentism and agriculture

The inseparable association of agriculture with sedentism has been based on the

assumption that farming practices necessitated a sedentary lifestyle and, therefore, the

former could not exist without the latter. But did sedentism always and necessarily lead to

agriculture?

The Near and Middle East, and also Mesoamerica (e.g. Flannery 1972), provided the

models for interpreting archaeological records from all over the world. Sedentism was seen

as one of the gradual degrees of pre-adaptation that led to the origins of agriculture (cf.,

among others, Braidwood and Willey 1962; Flannery 1969; Clark 1971). Flannery (1969)

considered this initial stage as the real revolution in human life and named it ‘broad

spectrum revolution’. He maintained that, in the terminal Pleistocene, hunter-gatherers

developed an intensive exploitation of wild food resources that were locally available,

broadening their range of exploitable food resources. These conditions favoured sedentism

and eventually led to agriculture.

Even Binford (1968), who did not work in Mesopotamia, focused on the question of

whether sedentism followed or preceded agriculture assuming that farming was the

inevitable response to demographic growth and population pressure. Binford argued that

the ‘broad spectrum revolution’ proposed by Flannery was ‘a broad spectrum depression,

not a revolution’ (1983: 212). He claimed that, when hunter-gatherers were packed in a

certain place, they were forced ‘to compensate for the more specialized (and no longer

viable) strategies they employed as spatially unfettered hunters’ (Binford 1983: 212).

Agriculture was again viewed by Harris (1989) as the ultimate stage of an evolutionary

continuum of people-plant interaction. Within this model, sedentism, population density

and social complexity increased over time from the early stage of wild plant food

procurement to the final one of full agriculture. Harris (1996) later expanded his model to

Semi-permanent foragers 199

the interactions of people with animals, as well as plants. Still, he conceived it in a

classificatory continuum with parallel interactions of people, plants and animals.

Although he developed this model for certain areas of Europe and Asia, he proposed it

to explain the origins and spread of agriculture and pastoralism in ‘Eurasia’, although,

according to present evidence, it does not seem to be applicable to colder or drier zones

(cf., e.g., Garcea 2003). Nevertheless, he identified two important stages between the early

one of gathering and collecting and the final one of farming. They represent, respectively,

cultivation with small-scale clearance and minimal tillage and cultivation with larger-scale

clearance and systematic tillage. These two systems of plant exploitation are also

fundamental for understanding the African subsistence economy described below.

Late North African foragers did adopt sedentism and other forms of pre-adaptation,

such as the exploitation of a broad spectrum of resources, and the manufacture of new

equipments, such as groundstone tools. However, they did not follow the path towards

plant domestication, which calls for a revision of the models on the origins of farming. The

tight bond between sedentism and agriculture identified for Southwest Asia and

Mesoamerica (Flannery 1972; Binford 1968, 1983; Harris 1989) has been even further

developed in a framework viewing sedentism as a ‘point of no return’ (Bar-Yosef and

Belfer-Cohen 1989). The line of evidence from North Africa contradicts this assumption.

Here, although sedentism increased, agriculture did not originate as its consequence.

Sedentism must be then considered as a human response to certain given social and

environmental conditions, but not as a precondition of supposedly future events. Dissents

on this ‘automatic’ perspective have argued that sedentism, combined with population

growth and environmental stress, is not sufficient to explain the origins of farming.

Another very important factor must be added among the changes related to sedentism: the

development of a more complex social organization (Price and Brown 1985; Price and

Gebauer 1995). Increased social organization and differentiation occurred among North

African foragers as well. In fact, the rise of socio-political complexity is not only

associated with agricultural groups, but is also connected with nomadic pastoral societies

(Caneva 1985, 1988; Sadr 1991). Livestock ownership is a very successful means of wealth

accumulation and an indicator of status differences. Animal husbandry represents the

ultimate stage of a subsistence organization based on a delayed return of resources and

labour (Alvard and Kuznar 2001). Woodburn (1982) distinguished between immediate-

return and delayed-return hunter-gatherers. Assets of the latter include processed and

stored food in fixed dwellings. Therefore, sedentism in North Africa favoured a delayed-

return strategy, but, as this grew, local wild resources were no longer able to sustain the

increased needs for set-aside provisions, and North African foragers had to switch to

nomadic pastoralism as the only sustainable form of food production in their

environment.

Sedentism and delayed-return strategy

Although Southwest Asia’s models for the origins of food production became universal

for the origins of plant and animal domestication throughout the world, archaeological

records from Africa (and other parts of the world as well) document contrasting sequences


to those identified in Southwest Asia and call into question their universal value. If the

concepts of ‘Neolithic package’ and ‘Neolithic revolution’ do not apply to many other

parts of the world, the entire paradigm of ‘Neolithic’ has been thoroughly disputed with

regard to Africa (e.g. Sinclair et al. 1993; Garcea 2004).

In most of North Africa, apart from the exceptions of the Egyptian oases of Nabta Playa

and Bir Kiseiba (Close 1980, 1984; Wendorf and Schild 1989; Wendorf et al. 2001), the

production of pottery and groundstone is independent of the origins of food domestication.

It occurred about 3000 years earlier, dating from around 9000 years BP and 6000 BP,

respectively. Furthermore, in North Africa, the origins of food production did not involve

farming and started with animal domestication, which imposed nomadic pastoralism.

Herding continued for several millennia before farming of pearl millet appeared in the

southern Sahara and the Sahel from around 4000 BP at the earliest (Neumann 2005). One of

the reasons why pastoralism has been more successful in North Africa is that farming is

more sensitive than herding due to considerable variation in rainfall, as is the case with

North Africa’s climate. Moreover, domestic ungulates can be best managed by moving

them to variable grazing fields (Marshall and Hildebrand 2002). Harlan (1989) was one of

the first scholars who noted that less favourable environments, such as arid and semi-arid

ones, are not propitious to plant domestication and encourage the preservation of wild

harvests. He observed that planting in dry lands without the use of irrigation techniques is

too risky for labour investments. He also recorded that over sixty species of wild grasses

have been harvested in Africa for their grains without domestication.

Intensification of resource exploitation does not necessarily lead to domestication. It is a

response to resource stress due to population pressure and climate deterioration, and

implies considerable investments of capital, labour and skills (Casey 2005). This has been a

particularly efficient subsistence practice of North African populations allowing them to

cope with irregular precipitations and to manage drier periods of reduced rainfall.

Marshall and Hildebrand (2002) observed that resource intensification results from the

need for higher predictability of food access and scheduled consumption. Domestication

may not be the – conscious or unconscious – final objective of tending and manipulating

plants practised for resource intensification. In addition to intensification, the adoption of

a delayed-return strategy involves increased predictability and increased sedentism.

Scheduled consumption not only develops knowledge of predictable access to locally

available food resources but also generates techniques of delayed consumption of

seasonally available products. As a consequence, this strategy requires the development of

storage facilities, including baskets and, more importantly, the production of ceramic

containers. In addition to storing food for later consumption, people using pottery can

boil foods, soften them, eliminate toxins from previously uneatable plants and prepare wet

foods, such as soups, stews, porridges and sauces (Casey 2005). Moreover, cooked foods

are more digestible, longer-lasting and more palatable. Cooking and the accumulation of

provisions provides foragers with a quantitatively and qualitatively broader subsistence

base, including a wider range of resources that could not be eaten raw, due to the presence

of toxins or to poor assimilation properties.

Also in Africa, fishing is another important component of the broader subsistence base

that increased sedentism could sustain. Although it is an extractive subsistence base like

hunting, it requires a specific social organization on land and elaborate procurement


techniques. Aquatic resources provide a high biomass and high-protein food supplies,

which are concentrated in the hydrologic basins. Consequently, river banks offer a wide

variety of resources in limited areas and more stable environmental conditions even under

seasonal or cyclic climatic changes. In these areas, land animals can also be more

accessible as they are naturally attracted by drinking water. Therefore, hunting-fishing-

gathering groups can practise their subsistence activities in the same areas and develop a

residential type of settlement organization. The exploitation of a high density and wide

variety of resources requires high skills to produce the necessary equipments, to coordinate

and share the work among the members of the group, and to plan activities according to

seasonal changes of the resources available in the local environment. Furthermore, the

access to and control of resources demand a more complex social organization than that of

nomadic hunters in order to organize subsistence activities and guarantee stability of the

settlements (Garcea 1996a).

All in all, the traditional paradigm of nomadic hunting and permanent food producing

is reversed in the Sahara and the Sudanese Upper Nile Valley. Hunter-gatherers practised

sedentism before their successor herders adopted nomadism. Thus, sedentarization

trajectories shifted from lesser to greater mobility, and not vice versa, as the ‘universal’

model predicted (Gifford-Gonzalez 2005). The use of large quantities of pottery and

grinding stones could be possible only if groups did not have a highly mobile settlement

organization, but were rather sedentary, as they could not easily carry heavy loads of

equipment. As the production of heavy equipment increased, the less mobile their

settlement system must have become. Therefore, sedentism in this region was only a

peculiarity of non-food producing societies and had to be successively abandoned by food

producers. Hence, it cannot be considered as one of the elements necessarily triggering

food production. The case of North Africa suggests a different trajectory, envisaging a

delayed-return strategy as an increasingly successful subsistence organization that led to a

system with further deferment and greater benefits, such as animal husbandry can provide

(Alvard and Kuznar 2001).

From the Fertile Crescent to sandy North Africa

Sutton contested ‘the obsession with the issue of food production’ (1974: 531) and

considered the late foraging stage as particularly significant in North Africa. In

consideration of the settlement system, subsistence economy and artefactual material

from Early Holocene sites in the Sahara and the Sudan, he proposed a new term

emphasizing the distinct features of North Africa, which he called Aquatic civilization or

Aqualithic (Sutton 1974, 1977). This definition seemed well suited to representing foraging

groups living in a more humid environment than the present Sahara or Sahel, with higher

rainfall and more permanent lakes and rivers allowing aquatic fauna to live there. Human

groups developed new technologies for the exploitation of riverine resources, such as bone

harpoons and fish hooks, geometric stone artefacts to form composite tools, groundstone

tools and pottery. They did not necessarily need agriculture to make use of grinding

stones, but could employ them for processing wild grains, as well as for cracking nuts,

pounding ochre or clay for pottery production, grinding dried meat and fish and polishing


bone tools (Caneva 1983). Sutton also suggested that the Aqualithic does not refer to a

single culture, but rather to a cultural complex sharing the same Nilo-Saharan language.

Haaland and Magid (1995; Haaland 1997) modified Sutton’s original term and

proposed Aqualithic adaptation in order to emphasize the exploitation of water resources,

the production of microlithic industries, polished grinders, pottery and bone industries,

and the emergence of sedentism and female symbolism. With regard to the use of pottery

for cooking, they added that boiled foods enabled infants to wean earlier and,

consequently, increased the fertility of women and the survival rate of infants.

Furthermore, they argued that increased sedentism also protected the weaker components

of the social groups, such as elders, ill people and children, and facilitated women during

pregnancy, birthing, nursing and child-care. All these conditions contributed to enhancing

population growth.

As claimed for other parts of the world (e.g. Binford and Chasko 1976), in North Africa

too reduced mobility played an important role in increasing women’s fertility and

population growth, but it did not become a no-return point. Other solutions had to be

found to answer to the consequences of reduced mobility. In order to understand the

North African model, it is necessary to look at how reduced mobility developed here.

The Sahara

Apart from in Egypt, research on the prehistory of North Africa and the Sahara started

later than in other regions of the world. The Egyptian Sahara is the only region where

investigations have continued since the 1930s (Caton-Thompson and Gardner 1934;

Caton-Thompson 1952; Wendorf and Schild 1976, 1980, 1989; Close 1980, 1984; Barich

and Hassan 1984–7; Barich 1998; Hope and Mills 1999; Marlow and Mills 2001; Hassan

et al. 2001; Wendorf et al. 2001). In the French-speaking part of North Africa, research

was mostly conducted between the 1950s and the 1980s by French scholars (Balout 1955,

1958; Hugot 1962, 1963; Camps-Fabrer 1966; Camps 1969, 1974; Maitre 1971; Aumassip

1972, 1980–81, 1986; Roset 1974, 1982, 1983; Petit-Maire 1979; Petit-Maire and Riser

1983). In the Libyan Sahara, investigations started in the 1960s and 1970s (Mori 1965,

1998; Barich 1974, 1987, 1998) and have continued until the present (Cremaschi and di

Lernia 1998; di Lernia 1999; Garcea 2001; di Lernia and Manzi 2002).

Evidence for increased sedentism was found in the Egyptian Western Desert. Pits, house

foundations and deep wells were discovered at Nabta Playa (Close 1984), and clusters of

stone structures representing hut circles were located at Dakhleh Oasis (McDonald 1991).

Here follows a discussion of the results of the latest investigations at Uan Tabu, a

rockshelter located in the wadi Teshuinat, Tadrart Acacus mountain range, south-west

Libya, where the present author conducted fieldwork between 1990 and 1993 (Garcea

1996b, 1996c, 1998a, 2001). The site is included in the concession area of the Joint Italo-

Libyan Mission for Prehistoric Research in the Sahara and the Interuniversity Centre for

Research on the Ancient Sahara and Arid Zones, formerly directed by F. Mori and

M. Liverani and presently by S. di Lernia of the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’, Italy.

European scholars working in North Africa have usually employed the termino-

logy developed for Mediterranean contexts, i.e. Epipalaeolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic.


However, as some components of the ‘Neolithic package’ appeared before the Neolithic,

it became necessary to readjust the terms as ‘Ceramic Epipalaeolithic’ or ‘Pottery-

bearing Mesolithic’. Earlier scholars did not even make the distinction and attributed all

sites with pottery to the Neolithic, the ‘Saharo-Sudanese Neolithic’, which resulted in an

undifferentiated context spread from the Atlantic Sahara to the Nile Valley and lasting

from the beginning of the Holocene to the Late Holocene. As this approach biased the

entire interpretation of North African prehistory, Garcea (1993, 1998b) introduced a

first differentiation based on the subsistence economy separating prepastoral from

pastoral cultures, and di Lernia and Garcea (1997) proposed new terms for the

archaeology of the Early Holocene in the Tadrart Acacus region: Early Acacus and Late

Acacus. The Early Acacus at Uan Tabu is dated between 9810+ 75 years BP (BO-509)

and 8880+ 100 BP (Rome-293), which represents its whole chronological span. The Late

Acacus occupational deposit has been partly eroded as it has been dated from

8870+ 100 (Rome-295) to 8580+ 80 BP (BO-344), whereas it lasted until at least 8000

years BP or later (Cremaschi and di Lernia 1999). Stratigraphic and artefactual changes

evidenced the shift from the Early Acacus to the Late Acacus, whereas no environmental

shifts appeared during this transitional phase (Cremaschi and di Lernia 1999). A climatic

change towards aridity occurred during the Late Acacus with pollen spectra indicating a

reduction of the savanna vegetation and an increase of shrubs (Mercuri and Trevisan

Grandi 2001). Pottery occasionally appeared in the Early Acacus, but became common

in the Late Acacus. All ceramics were decorated with rocker stamping to make dotted

zigzags (Plate 1). Petrographic analyses of ceramic pastes indicated the presence of

granite, a rock that is not present in the Tadrart Acacus and its closest source is located

near the Algerian border, about 70km south west of the mountain range (Livingstone

Smith 2001). It has been argued that this early pottery may have symbolized prestige,

ownership of stored goods or social interactions (Close 1995). Furthermore, exchanges

of goods, including ceramics, may have been part of a network with neighbouring

groups, acknowledging reciprocity as a means of risk reduction under environmental

stress (Cashdan 1985).

Microlithic tools were a considerable component of the Early Acacus technological

assemblage and were made on both local and non-local raw materials. By contrast, the

Late Acacus lithic techno-complex consisted mainly of generic formal tools on a

macroflake made from local sandstone (Fig. 2), suggesting activities requiring a longer

time for processing, preparing and manufacturing food and secondary products. Wooden

tools, such as perforators (Plate 2), vegetal artefacts, such as baskets and cords, polished

bone tools (Plate 3) and ostrich eggshell beads and fragments, some of them circular-

shaped or decorated, were common in the Late Acacus. Baskets were used for either wild

grain winnowing or storage. The walls of the Uan Tabu rockshelters exhibited rock

paintings with a superimposition of two Round Head anthropomorphic figures covered by

Pastoral paintings representing a herd of cattle. The Round Head phase belongs to the

Late Acacus and represents the earliest paintings in the Saharan rock art as well as the

earliest known anthropomorphic figures (Mori 1965, 1998). Rock art has been associated

with the need to mark the territory by means of permanent signs (di Lernia 1999; Garcea

2003), corroborating the evidence that the inhabitants of the rockshelters had a sense of

ownership or attachment to a chosen space.


The Early Acacus was organized around a high mobility system connected to high

seasonal resource variability. During the Late Acacus, sedentism considerably increased

although it never became permanent in this area. During the same period, interregional

relations and long-distance trade and/or exchange developed, as the presence of non-local

pottery indicated. Increased sedentism was also evidenced by a marked intra-site

organization. At Uan Tabu, a wooden hut was found in the Late Acacus layers and

spatial analysis of the artefactual material within the site indicated that certain activities

were performed in the hut area and others outside it. The site included complex and large

combustion structures suggesting that some were used repetitively for the same activity

and others for a series of different activities. At Ti-n-Torha East, another rockshelter in the

Tadrart Acacus, five adjacent walled huts were found leaning against the wall of the shelter

(Barich 1974) (Fig. 3).

With regard to subsistence base, Barbary sheep hunting predominated in the Early

Acacus and decreased in the Late Acacus to about 45–60 per cent in favour of the

Plate 1 Impressed pottery with dotted zigzags from Uan Tabu.


exploitation of a broader faunal spectrum, Barbary sheep corralling and delayed and

planned resource consumption of both animals and plants (Gautier 1987; di Lernia 1999,

2001; Mercuri and Trevisan Grandi 2001; Garcea 2003). The formation processes of the

Figure 2 Late Acacus retouched tools from Uan Tabu.

Plate 2 Wooden perforator from Uan Tabu.


stratigraphic sequence at Uan Tabu, as well as at the nearby site of Uan Afuda, indicated

that an organic colluviated unit was reworked with coprolites that accumulated during

multiple colluviation phases (Cremaschi and Trombino 2001). Micromorphological

analyses suggested that the coprolites belong to caprines, which, as the archaeozoological

assemblage indicated, have been attributed to Barbary sheep (Ammotragus lervia).

Moreover, the colluvial deposit showed laminations of trampled dung and fodder,

corroborating the practice of Barbary sheep corralling.

Wild grasses were intensively collected and used for different purposes and the

accumulation of plants at the site doubled. Such an intensive exploitation, which

probably led to overexploitation in combination with climatic deterioration, forced the

people living at Uan Tabu during the final phase of the Late Acacus (Unit I) to reduce

their spectrum of plant resources slightly and to develop specialized exploitation

of some plants, such as Gramineae, particularly Paniceae (Panicum, Setaria,

Echinochloa), and cattails (Typha) that were used for food, bedding, weaving and

building. Burned caryopses of Gramineae were found at the site, suggesting that they

were roasted and stored for later consumption (Mercuri 2001). Cultivation with small-

scale clearance and minimal tillage (sensu Harris 1989) was practised in the wadi

Teshuinat. According to Mercuri (2001), these activities allowed the preservation and

survival of some selected wild cereals and plants even when their habitat was reduced.

In fact, wild cereals survived in the wadi Teshuinat even when dry climatic episodes

could have caused their total disappearance from the area. Charred wood used for fuel,

as the charcoal collected from the hearths indicated, confirmed the exploitation of a

large spectrum of resources during the Late Acacus, which mostly comprised

Tamarix, but also other species, such as Chenopodiaceae, Calotropis procera and the

first tropical elements (Salvadora persica and Leptadenia pyrotechnica) (Neumann and

Uebel 2001).

Plate 3 Bone tools from Uan Tabu.


The Sudan

Early Khartoum is the cultural horizon that spread in the Upper Nile Valley during the

Early Holocene. It derives its name from the first excavated locality at Khartoum Hospital

(Fig. 1), where Arkell (1949) unearthed a site occupied by hunter-fisher-gatherers

producing pottery, bone harpoons, microlithic industries and grinding implements. Since

then, research on the Early Khartoum period has continued along the Upper Nile Valley

and its eastern and western tributaries (Adamson et al. 1974; Mohammed-Ali 1982;

Caneva 1983, 1988; Marks and Mohammed-Ali 1991; Caneva et al. 1993; Haaland and

Magid 1995; Kuper 1995; Jesse 2003). This section summarizes the results of fieldwork

conducted by the present author in the Khartoum Province from 1986 to 1991 within the

Archaeological Mission for Prehistoric Research in Egypt and Sudan of the University of

Rome ‘La Sapienza’, Italy, directed by I. Caneva, and the results of her investigations

carried out since 2004 with the Archaeological Mission at Sai Island (Sudan) (Fig. 1) of

Figure 3 Walled huts from Ti-n-Torha East (from Barich 1974).


the University of Lille III, France, directed formerly by F. Geus and presently by

D. Devauchelle.

The main features of the Early Khartoum include a high density and large extension of

the sites, covering between 1 and 4.5 hectares, which did not occur either before or after the

Early Khartoum expansion. The thickness of the archaeological deposits, the frequency of

burials and the density of potsherds and animal bones, reaching up to 800 and 650

fragments per excavated m3, respectively, suggest that sites represent permanent or semi-

permanent occupations (Caneva 1988–9). Chronology indicates that Early Khartoum

lasted for a long period of time, covering almost 3000 years and spanning between around

8600 years BP and 5500 BP. The material culture shows a cultural and chronological

development including two phases: the early one with incised wavy line pottery (Plate 4),

which is typical of the Upper Nile Valley, and a late one with impressed dotted wavy lines

and zigzags (Plate 5). This second type of ware is earlier in the Sahara, dating from the tenth

millennium BP, whereas it appears in the Nile Valley only towards the end of the seventh

millennium BP. Therefore, it has been argued that it derived from Saharan influences or

migrations. Lithic assemblages include a microlithic tool-kit (Fig. 4) and harpoons

predominate among bone tools (Fig. 5). Faunal remains indicate a wide range of exploited

wild animals, including large fish (Lates, Synodontis and Bagrus), which must have been

caught with a complex technology including rafts or boats from deep waters. Other fish

were caught in the floodplain, such as Clarias and Tilapia, when the waters were lower. In

the Khartoum Province, fish was a very important group among vertebrates and was

available almost all year round. Hunting was mostly focused on oribi, a small antelope

(Ourebia ourebi), and kob, a medium-large antelope (Kobus kob), but was an opportunistic

activity that was practised when animals came near water resources (Caneva et al. 1993).

Plate 4 Wavy line pottery from the Khartoum Province (except No. 8).


The Khartoum Variant is a regional variation of the Early Khartoum that was spread in

the northern part of the Sudan. It was originally identified by Shiner (1968) and

Nordstrom (1972) during salvage excavations for the construction of the Aswan High

Dam at the Sudanese-Egyptian border. Shiner (1968) located the first sites in the Wadi

Halfa-Second Cataract area. Sai Island is located between the Second and the Third

Cataracts of the Nile river. Surface site prospecting and remote sensing revealed several

sites dating to the Khartoum Variant along the ancient river banks and on gravel terraces

on the island (Hesse and Chagny 1994). These sites featured small circular depressions

representing hut floors and suggesting a certain internal organization and planning of the

living space. Occasional limited test pits indicated that anthropic deposits were preserved

in situ, confirming the presence of habitation structures (Geus 1997, 1998). One of these

sites, 8-B-10C, was selected for extensive excavation (Garcea 2005). Layer 1 comprised an

exceptionally large amount of artefacts, consisting of an average of over 260 pieces per

Plate 5 Dotted wavy line pottery from the Khartoum Province (except No. 2).


square metre. Although this layer was originally thicker and was affected by deflation,

the high artefact density suggested intensive occupation of the area. Other indicators

corroborated the evidence for a complex occupational area and a residential use of the

site. A large, articulated shallow pit was excavated in the western sector and displayed

various sub-circular or oval hut floors that were cut one inside the other (Fig. 6).

Another large oval shallow pit appeared in the eastern sector (Structure 1B), comprising

an elongated cluster of fairly large stones, a small oval pit adjacent to the north-eastern

margin of the hut floor (Structure 1C), and several scattered stones. These pits included

various sub-circular pits, possibly representing different hut floors that were

subsequently cut one inside the other during various periods of occupation. Outside

the pits there were two hearths (1A and 1D) and several oxidized areas, suggesting

occasional fires. Moreover, twenty-two postholes were found both inside and outside the

pits. The two hearths and Structure 1C were used as disposal areas, including burnt

potsherds, burnt and broken stones, and a few lithics (exploited cores and often broken

Figure 4 Retouched tools from the Khartoum Province.


flakes). Charcoal from the two hearths was dated to 5980+ 40 years BP (KIA-24464)

and 6080+ 35 BP (KIA-24463).

Evidence for the construction of huts during the Early Holocene also came from areas

both north of Wadi Halfa and south of Sai Island, namely at Nabta Playa, in the Egyptian

Western Desert (Wendorf et al. 2001), and at El-Barga near Kerma, just south of the Third

Cataract (Honegger 2003, 2004). These sites were occupied by people with a foraging

economy and artefactual equipment that was very similar to that identified at Sai Island.

Final remarks

The examples from the Libyan Sahara and the Sudanese Nile Valley provide an overview

of human adaptation to Early Holocene semi-arid environments. The Sahara has never

Figure 5 Bone harpoons from Saggai, Khartoum Province (from Caneva 1983).


been green, but has certainly been greener than today, with savannas extending far into the

present desert, such as the Tadrart Acacus mountain range, where a Sahelian type of

vegetation grew during that period (Neumann 2005). During the Early Holocene climatic

amelioration, rainfall and temperatures increased and mosaic zones with water catchments

replaced the formerly arid areas of the Late Pleistocene. Such an ‘idyllic’ life lasted no more

than a maximum of two millennia, between about 10,000 and 8000 years BP, confirming

alternating spells of dry and moist periods which could not sustain permanently lush

vegetation in the Sahara. Even when hydrologic basins were at their maximum heights, water

supplies and food resources were concentrated around them, forming a patchy mosaic of

drier and moister areas. The 228 parallel N, which presently corresponds to the border

between Egypt and Sudan, separates two distinct ecological zones, with winter rains to the

north and summer rains to the south. During the Early Holocene, the Sudanese belt

experienced a northern shift of the Sahelian savannas of 500–600km, bringing grassland and

open woodland fauna and flora into the area (Neumann 1989; Wendorf and Schild 1998).

There are major ecological and economic differences between food systems in North

Africa and the Near East and, therefore, the evidence from the latter cannot be used to

interpret the former. The archaeological evidence from the Sahara and the Sudan confirms

that sedentism can be independent from the adoption of agriculture and food production

with domestication in general. In North Africa, sedentism is associated with pottery

production, exploitation of aquatic resources and consumption of boiled foods, which all

Figure 6 Hut floors and postholes from site 8-B-10C, Sai Island.


predate food production, but none of them led to agriculture. Sedentism enabled foragers

to change their dietary habits and shift to a reliance on stew and porridge, instead of raw

meat and grains. Haaland (2005) breaks the sedentism-agriculture binomial by arguing

that, when wheat and barley were domesticated in the Near East, farmers were not

producing ceramics yet because they did not need them and domestic cereals were

cultivated to make flour and to bake bread. On the other hand, foragers in North Africa

used pottery for preserving and cooking their wild foods. Even when plants were

domesticated in North Africa after 4000 BP, they were not wheat and barley, but millet and

sorghum, two cereals that were best suited for making porridge, not bread. Therefore,

Haaland disputed that food traditions in the Near East combined bread with the use of the

oven, whereas in North Africa they associated porridge with ceramics. These systems also

required distinct social relations, with the oven as a collective facility shared by the group

outside the homestead and ceramic goods as individual equipment used inside the home.

Late foragers in the Sahara and Sudan continually occupied the same sites for long

periods of time throughout the year. Ecological conditions with concentrated water and

food resources made it possible, or even necessary, to use continually the same locations,

which, in the Sahara, were restricted to seasonal rivers or periodically rising and shrinking

lakes until at least the end of the eighth millennium BP. During the seventh millennium BP,

the climate deteriorated and several Saharan groups had to move to surrounding regions,

including the Nile Valley. These people entered into contact with local populations, as

indicated by the shift in ceramic productions with the typically Saharan impressed dotted

wavy lines replacing Nilotic incised wavy line motifs. The Nile continued to offer milder

conditions to its inhabitants, whereas the Sahara gradually gave way to the desert.

Eventually, some groups returned to the Sahara at the beginning of the sixth millennium

BP and brought with them animal domesticates which required a nomadic way of life.

In North Africa, sedentism did not last, but triggered the irreversible trend towards

social complexity. Here, Early Holocene sedentism did not imply the emergence of

agriculture because the environment was not able to sustain cultivation of domestic plants.

On the contrary, the acquisition of food production required increased mobility and a

nomadic settlement system. Sedentism allowed the development of delayed-return strategy

and this, not sedentism, led to food production by means of animal husbandry.

The North African scenario demonstrates that sedentism is not the component of a fixed

package, but it derived from a complex cultural organization that fostered the invention of

new technological means for food preparation and conservation for a more efficient

delayed-return economy that could sustain large groups of people under variable

environmental conditions. The emergence of these socioeconomic innovations breaks the

concept of ‘Neolithic package’ and revolutionizes the notion of ‘Neolithic revolution’.

Dipartimento di Filologia e Storia, Universita’ di Cassino, Italy

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Elena A. A. Garcea, PhD, Universita’ di Roma ‘La Sapienza’, Italy, 1991, is Researcher in

Prehistory at the University of Cassino, Italy, where she teaches ‘Prehistory’ and ‘Methods

of Archaeological Research’. She has been, and still is, in charge of archaeological research

projects in Libya, Niger and Sudan. Her research interests include the spread of modern

humans in the Sahara and the Maghreb during the Upper Pleistocene and the last hunter-

gatherers in the Upper Nile Valley and the Sahara during the Early Holocene.


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Semi-permanent foragers in semi-arid environments of North Africa

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