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Cultural adaptations at Uan Tabu from the Upper Pleistocene to the Late Holocene
Abstract
This concluding chapter is an attempt to organise the data presented in the previous chapters, which provide a conspicuous amount of information on several aspects of the settlement history of Uan Tabu and its surroundings. The contributions from different scientific perspectives offer a multi-faceted framework for the peoples who occupied Uan Tabu from the late Upper Pleistocene to the Late Holocene. Here, I present the data in a chronological and cultural sequence. The rockshelter was first thought to be an Early Pastoral site. When it was re-excavated in the 1990s, its cultural attribution was reviewed and the main occupation was assigned to the Holocene prepastoral horizons, which were termed Early and Late Acacus, in order to avoid confusions with Mediterranean-biased terms, such as Epipalaeolithic and Mesolithic. An earlier deposit, below the Holocene one, was also identified and was attributed to the Aterian. Therefore, the aims of this book are to review all the periods of occupation and use of Uan Tabu, providing new information and organising existing data in a global frame of reference for the prehistory in the area. To sum up, evidence for Aterian, Early Acacus, Late Acacus, Early Pastoral, and Late Pastoral occupations could be identified at Uan Tabu. Furthermore, the Aterian evidence could be integrated in a wider context, including the Middle Palaeolithic detected in the surroundings and in the Messak Settafet plateau.
The 8000 years old early neolithic site E-75-6 at Nabta Playa, southern Egypt, yielded charred plant remains of over 120 taxa. Several species of edible plants were recovered, many of which are still gathered for food in the Sahara today. The in-site distribution of plant remains indicated the use of four different sets of plants by people living in various huts and pits, which may relate to the dominance of these plants in the local vegetation stands. The distribution of sorghum differed from that of the other edible plants, probably reflecting its special significance for the inhabitants of the site. The sorghum grains were morphologically wild, and could have been collected from natural stands, or irregularly cultivated with the décrue technique. This early cultivation did not lead to domestication, but provides early evidence for the human skill of cultivating such useful plants.
This volume presents a completely new and very substantial body of information about the origin of agriculture and plant use in Africa. All the evidence is very recent and for the first time all this archaeobotanical evidence is brought together in one volume (at present the information is unpublished or published in many disparate journals, confer ence reports, monographs, site reports, etc. ). Early publications concerned with the origins of African plant domestication relied almost exclusively on inferences made from the modem distribution of the wild progenitors of African cultivars; there existed virtually no archaeobotanical data at that time. Even as recently as the early 1990s direct evidence for the transition to farming and the relative roles of indigenous versus Near Eastern crops was lacking for most of Africa. This volume changes that and presents a wide range of ex citing new evidence, including case studies from Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Uganda, Egypt, and Sudan, which range in date from 8000 BP to the present day. The volume ad dresses topics such as the role of wild plant resources in hunter-gatherer and farming com munities, the origins of agriculture, the agricultural foundation of complex societies, long-distance trade, the exchange of foods and crops, and the human impact on local vege tation-all key issues of current research in archaeology, anthropology, agronomy, ecol ogy, and economic history.
Recent work in the fossil lacustrine basins of Bir Tarfawi and Bir Sahara East has yielded a large quantity of paleoecological data from complex, but well established, lithostratigraphic contexts. Dating is not ideal since it depends on recently developed techniques. In spite of some problems with chronology and correlation, it is clear that the southern Eastern Sahara saw several relatively long episodes of increased humidity and rainfall in the Middle and Upper Pleistocene, some of which involved rainfall as high as 500 mm per annum. The best studied wet episodes are associated with Middle Paleolithic occupations and correlate with Isotope Stage 5.
As within other scientific inquiries, archaeology embraces a strong interplay between technology and theory. Of the many technological advances in modern archaeology, 14C dating has had perhaps the greatest influence on shaping theoretical developments within Near Eastern prehistory. Whereas this influence has been most obvious in the domain of major cultural-historic questions (eg, the emergence of social complexity), a more significant theoretical consequence of the technique rests in the way Near Eastern prehistorians have come to explain variability in the prehistoric record.
This chapter discusses preagricultural sedentism. The Levant during the terminal Pleistocene offers an intriguing opportunity for the comparison of different adaptive systems and their evolution. During the period from around 14,000 to 10,000 years ago, simple hunting–gathering societies gave way to complex hunter–gatherers who were subsequently replaced by agriculturalists. However, in the Levant, changes in procurement and settlement strategies, demographic patterns, and social organization are at present recognized to have been more profound during the first rather than the second transition. From a diachronic perspective, three general observations can be made relative to complex hunting–gathering systems. First, such systems experienced quite short durations, normally not exceeding two to three millennia. Second, such systems were most common during the terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene (that is., after ca. 10,500 B.C.), although there are some indications of their presence earlier in the Pleistocene. Third, such complex adaptations were typically transitional between simple hunting–gathering and agricultural systems. While the simple hunting–gathering and agricultural systems have been well studied from the static and evolutionary perspectives of ethnography and archeology, few investigations have been devoted to more complex hunter–gatherers.