Geophysical Monograph Series, 2012

Landscapes and Societies: Selected Cases, 2010

Quaternary Science Reviews, 2004

ABSTRACT This paper reviews the various Late Quaternary records that are available from western Egypt and northern Sudan, which includes more than 500 published radiocarbon dates and various sedimentary archives from local landscape components, including palaeolakes, soils, drainages (wadis), and archaeological sites. This palaeoenvironmental compilation frames the spatial and temporal context of local cultural activities when the region was most hospitable B9000–6000 BP; at this time, monsoonal weather influenced the portion of the African continental interior, creating enough convective rainfall for occasional surface water storage. In this part of the modern Sahara, rapid hydroclimatic changes play a key role in geomorphic evolution and resource availability. As ‘watering holes’ formed and dried up in the Early to Middle Holocene, Neolithic people developed various subsistence strategies, including opportunistic hunting of small animals (e.g. gazelle and hare), and food-related (e.g. wild sorghum, millet, and legumes) activities: gathering, plant cultivation and livestock-rearing. During its wettest phases during the ‘monsoonal maximum,’ the area was drought-prone, sustaining a meager steppe– shrub desert flora. Further desertification and aeolian deflation during the Middle and Late Holocene fostered technological innovation, migration and settlement, as well as the further development of agrarian communities and complex culture.

2021

Antiquity 88: 95-111, 2014

The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 2021

Presentation to the Egyptian Study Society (Denver, Colorado), February 17, 2015. Early scholars were puzzled by the sudden appearance of civilization in the Nile Valley. Where did those people come from? How did they become so civilized so fast? Modern excavations are providing the answer: the people came from the Western Desert, graduates of a climate-driven accelerated learning program. Interdisciplinary teams of archeologists, anthropologists, geologists, paleobotanists, paleobiologists, archeoastronomers and climate scientists are painting a fascinating picture of cultural adaptation and displacement, as people responded to an accelerating set of environmental challenges before transplanting themselves to the Nile Valley. We’ll explore evidence of cultural linkages from settlements and cemeteries; rock art, megalithic stonework and stellar orientations; and trading networks that fed the desire for ancient forms of consumer “stuff.” We’ll also look at some of the ways this new evidence is changing our understanding of early Egyptian culture and how human civilizations evolve.

This book is a synthetic approach to the issue connected with the Holocene climate change in the lower part of the Nile Basin, based on a wide spectrum of geological and geoarchaeological data. Its main aim is a presentation of detailed scenario of environmental processes in Egypt and northern Sudan with regard to development and collapse of the past human cultures and civilizations, especially in the Nile Valley and the Western Desert.

Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 2013