The Western Desert

during the 5th and 4th millennia BC

The Late and Final Neolithic in the Nabta-Kiseiba Area

Fred Wendorfand Romuald Schild

The Neolithic Background

Neolithic settlement in the Western Desert of Egypt extends back to the earliest part of the Holocene, and lasted until around 3000 cal BC (4500 bp), when increasing aridity forced the general abandonment of the desert, with one minor break, until today (Schild and Wendorf 2001a). During much of that time, until around 4400 cal BC (5600-5500 bp), all evidence indicates that the people in the Egyptian Nile Valley did not know pottery and were focused on fi¬ shing in the summer, gathering nut-grass tubers and other wild plants and hunting ducks and geese in the fall, and occasio¬ nally killing wild cattle, hartebeest and ga¬ zelle, while the people in the desert were domesticating cattle, making fine, decora¬ ted pottery and learning how to live in the desert year-round (Wendorf et al 2001). The source or sources of these new tech¬ nologies is not known, but there is no evi¬ dence that they came from the Nile Valley. It is in the desert that the earliest domestic cattle known anywhere occur (Gautier

2001), and it is there that some of the ear¬ liest well-made pottery has been found (Nelson 2002a). Despite the challenging and unstable climate of the Western Desert throughout the Holocene, those groups who occupied the desert made a remar¬ kable adjustment that enabled them to live in the desert during all but the driest of times. Before we can understand the people of the Late and Final Neolithic and the remarkable contributions they made to the technological, social and religious life of later Egyptians, it would be useful to review the entities that preceded them in this desert.

A long period of hyper-aridity in the Wes¬ tern Desert that coincided with the cold, glacial periods at higher latitudes in Eu¬ rope and North America ended around 9250-9150 cal BC (10,000 bp) when it began to rain (this and subsequent dates in this paper are calibrated radiocarbon mea¬ surements using the Calib 3.o.3c program of Stuiver and Reimer 1993). Thick playa deposits below the oldest known Holocene

n° 14-décembre 2004 • ARCHÉO-NIL 13