Abstract:
Many current approaches to modelling settlement pattern for early Holocene sites in the Eastern Sahara continue to rely on identifying different site types and ‘cultural’ groups. A significant portion of these site types were defined by the Combined Prehistoric Expedition (CPE), which linked changes in settlement pattern to changes in the environment (e.g., wet and dry periods) and cultural changes identified through differences in assemblage composition (e.g., El Nabta or El Adam). Due to the nature of the archaeological record in the desert, these divisions are primarily defined by differences in the number and proportions of different tools at each site through techno-typological analysis. However, these divisions have not been tested for their significance. Legacy collections and legacy assemblages provide an opportunity to re-examine the data that supports commonly held assumptions in archaeology. Using samples from legacy collections also requires a sufficient understanding of their context and what proportion of the original site they represent. This thesis focuses on testing whether differences in the diversity of lithic assemblages drawn from the CPE legacy collections support established identifications of site types through time and across space when the sample size is considered. SHE diversity analysis is presented as a method for identifying where diversity within an assemblage differs from an expected trend created through increasing sample size. The results suggest that sample size significantly contributes to the differences between assemblages analysed in this study with the history of curation, and observer differences also impacting some variation. Overall, this suggests that the techno-typological analysis of lithic artefacts lacks the specificity required to demonstrate differences in site types that are needed to discuss changes in settlement pattern in the Eastern Sahara.
