Prehistoric Herdsmen

[anansi]

Michal Kobusiewicz, Romald Schild, Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology (2005)

... the Combined Prehistoric Expedition has discovered a massive kurgan in the Nabta Playa lake basin, towering over the fields of stone monoliths, now destroyed by the desert winds. Its small burial pit was found to contain the head of a child 2.5 to 3 years old, undoubtedly the offspring of a powerful ruler of the Nubian Desert about 3,500 years BC, just prior to the establishment of the first Egyptian state.

We already know that soon after this date, drought forced the herders to abandon these lands. Digging deeper and deeper wells proved insufficient, and people had go elsewhere in search of water. And so where might they have gone, if not to the relatively close Nile Valley? They brought with them the various achievements of their culture and their belief system. Perhaps it was indeed these people who provided the crucial stimulus towards the emergence of state organization in ancient Egypt.
wysinger.homestead.com/20-24_20kobusiewicz.pdf
also at Gebel Ramlah
Reposted from E/S by Myra Wysinger
www.egyptsearch.com/forums/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=8;t=007364

[sundiata]

Update from Schild and the gang. Basically they dig further, tracing continuity in African pottery styles from their early inception and establishing a relationship between the Arkinian of Lower Nubia and the people of Napta Playa and Egypt's western desert, claiming the latter likely emerged from some Nile Valley industry.

Finds of the earliest African pottery come from the south-eastern and southern fringes of the
Sahara as well as its central, mountainous regions, i.e. the areas of the Early Holocene reach
of the summer rainfall, a consequence of the northward shift of monsoonal circulation. The
oldest African vessels from fired clay known so far represent a very high technological level
and a simple, very limited range of shapes.
It is obvious that Early Holocene colonisers of the Sahara came from regions that could
be settled during the arid period of the late Pleistocene. This poses yet another problem —
where were they situated? Could these regions also include the mountainous central Sahara
(Jesse 2003a: 43)? Most of the central Sahara data, however, indicate the onset of humid
conditions as late as the Early Holocene (compare summary in Wendorf et al. 2007: 197).
In short, data presently to hand exclude the possibility of human survival in the central
Sahara mountainous area during the Late Glacial or early Last Termination.
It is more than likely that the Early Holocene colonisers of the southern Western Desert,
the El Adam hunter-gatherer-cattle keepers, came to the south-eastern fringes of the Sahara
from the Nile Valley. The El Adam technology and style is almost identical to that of the
Arkinian, a final Late Palaeolithic culture known from the flooded village of Arkin in Lower
Nubia, some 80km to the south-east of Nabta Playa (Schild et al. 1968). The oldest known
Arkinian settlements have been securely dated to the early Younger Dryas, c. 10 900–10 400
cal BC (Wendorf et al. 1979). Other sites, whilst clearly stratigraphically younger, have not
yet been radiocarbon dated. Excavations of the early Arkinian occupations have not yielded
pottery; however, the areas opened were limited to only around 20m2
at the oldest in situ
campsite — Dibeira West 1, Concentration A (Schild et al. 1968: 654; de Heinzelin 1968:
fig. 41).
Here we should perhaps mention important possible parallels resulting from stratigraphies
of language in north-eastern Africa. The terminology associated with cattle raising in the
northern Sudanic division of the Nilo-Saharan languages was established before 8500 BC,
perhaps around the same time that the first pottery-making registered in the lexical data
(Ehrer 2006: 1044). Where, then, were the most likely potential African pottery inventors
112Research
Maciej Jordeczka ´ et al.
and pot-makers dwelling? Presumably also in the areas of natural occurrence of the extinct
aurochs, in our case in the Nile Valley, in Lower Nubia, north of the tsetse fly line

Early Holocene pottery in the Western
Desert of Egypt: new data from Nabta
Playa (2011)



Maciej Jordeczka ´
1
, Halina Krolik, ´
2
Mirosław Masojc´
3
& Romuald Schild


www.sendspace.com/file/e9qqrz


^So much for Ian Shaw's claim that the "Badarian are no longer thought to have come from the south" by virtue of their shared close affinities with the populations of the western desert (since ultimately they would have according to this new data).

[sundiata]

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