Assessing the Temporal Foundations of Supra-Regional Models for Early to Mid-Holocene Climate-Cultural Change, Northeast Africa

Abstract

Cultural-climatic research of the Neolithic expansion in Northeast Africa is situated within a long history of archaeological investigation and debate. Modelling of this expansion is influenced by global academic trends in the conceptualisation and interpretation of the process of Neolization. Traditionally perceived as a unidirectional, dualistic transition from hunter-gathering to agriculture, technical and conceptual advances over the last two decades, alongside increased access to high resolution data, has prompted the recognition of socio-economic change as a highly variable and dynamic process, one that is neither inevitable nor motivated by a single external or internal force. However, within the wider context of Mediterranean Neolization, Northeast Africa remains terra incognita. Northeast African evidence of localised variability that fails to fit into traditional notions of Neolization, together with discrepancies between the timing and character of existing reconstructions for Early to Mid-Holocene cultural-climatic change, calls into question the way in which radiocarbon data are employed as accurate temporal and spatial indicators of the emergence of agro-pastoralism. The aim of this study is to investigate these discrepancies by assessing the integrity and reliability of 935 uncalibrated radiocarbon determinations and their associated calibration indices from 13 regions in Northeast Africa. In order to evaluate the protocols involved in the original sampling and recording of these data, and the manner in which 14C samples are linked to both their cultural and non-cultural contexts, a detailed assessment of the current datasets for both Nabta Playa and the Fayum depression is presented. Findings indicate that limited data and an overrepresentation of site-specific localities prevent the critical assessment of localised variability in humanenvironment interaction to quantitatively evaluate large-scale causal models. This underscores the generalist nature of these models and the degree to which radiocarbon data are essentialised to formulate universalist explanations of the emergence of agriculture in Egypt. A better understanding of the formation of the archaeological record, along with the standardisation of sampling techniques within-and-between projects, is required in studies of the emergence of agriculture if we are to move beyond the idea of Northeast Africa as terra incognita. Keywords: Northeast Africa, Egypt, Fayum, Nabta Playa, radiocarbon, archaeology, palaeoenvironment, Early Holocene, Mid-Holocene, Neolization, Neolithic Package.