ARKAMANI Sudan Electronic Journal of Archaeology and Anthropology

August 2002

Since the beginning of the 1960's the archaeology of Africa has played a major part in research at the university of Cologne. At this time the institutes for African Studies and for Prehistoric Archaeology forged a common project for documenting the rock art of southern Africa. In 1989 the Heinrich-Barth Institute for archaeology and history of Africa was founded where now archaeology and linguistics conjoined with botany, geography, egyptology, history and ethnology in an interdisciplinary long term project.

The objective is to learn how people adapted economy and lifestyle to the difficult ecological conditions of the deserts and semi-deserts of Africa during the last 10.000 years, with regard to the correlation between climatic and cultural development. Of interest are the ways people coped with the extreme conditions, influenced them on their part and what kind of survival strategies they developed in these regions up to this day. The choice of Egypt, Sudan and Namibia as the major fields of work places the main focus of research on northeastern and southwestern Africa. This was done to enable the extensive transcontinental comparison in order to discern differences and parallels in human cultural behavior as well as potential cultural-historical correlations.

A fundamental hypothesis of the research project lies in the assumption that the history of the entire continent was decisively influenced by the beginning of the drying up of the Sahara region around 5000 BC. The population movements triggered by this gave substantial impulses to the forming of the pharaonic civilization in the Nile valley. This process influenced the distribution of peoples and languages even of today over the entire continent so fundamentally that one may consider the drying up of the Sahara and the ecological consequences thereof as a driving force of the history of Africa.

Agriculture and above all pastoralism determine the basis and the form of human life in large parts of the African continent. This is especially true for the extensive arid regions which cover more than a third of the entire continent. It is here where pastoral nomads developed survival strategies over thousands of years which helped to adapt human lifestyle to the challenges of an extreme environment.

The hitherto known dates for the earliest appearance of domesticated animals in the different parts of the continent show a clear time difference from northeast to southwest. Indicators for the domestication of cattle in the western desert of Egypt as early as the 9th millennium BC. are as to date disputed but appear to be more likely due to a new DNA-tests. The oldest proofs from the Sudan however date back into the 4th millennium BC., the ones from eastern Africa into the 3rd millennium BC. At the Cape, cattle obviously appears several hundred years after sheep and goat, which for their part manifested themselves around the beginning of the Christian era. This hypothetic course of the "beginning of food-production" in Africa was preconditioned by the fact that sheep and goats, other than cattle, are not native to Africa. If one rules out a passage over the Indian Ocean, for which there are no indications, they must have come from the Near East to northern Africa as domesticated animals. From here they started their long way over the continent.

Just during a time of extreme cultural change, at the beginning of the holocene, the repopulation of the Libyan desert, which is in general one of the most interesting sections of the old world prehistory, took place in the north of the continent. After extending further into the south during the end of the Ice Age living conditions in the Sahara became even more hostile than they are today. About 12.000 years ago conditions improved and in the wake of animals and plants people claimed the desert for themselves again. Given this background archaeologists find themselves in a fascinating starting position comparable to that of the biologist who is able to observe the appearance of life on a volcanic island newly emerged from the sea. In the case of the eastern Sahara the entire process including its ending is tangible so that the subject of investigation is clearly defined time-wise. Nowadays the Libyan desert between Kgarga and Wadi Howar, between Kufra and the Nile valley- an area of over 720.000 km² twice the size of Germany- is void of human life again.

The origin of this so-called neolithic-wet-phase. a climatic improvement which was actually neither "wet" nor "neolithic", was, according to all climatic and vegetational historic data so far available, situated in the southern part of the Sahara. Obviously the monsoon rain-front starting here spread relatively rapidly towards the north. The newest results from excavations in the great sand-sea of western Egypt place the repopulation of this extremely arid region into the middle of the 9th millennium BC. This gives a date only a few hundred years after this radical change took place in the more southern parts of the Sahara. The settlement sites under research were all situated on the bank area of temporary lakes which developed at the bottom of longitudinal dunes formated during the ending of the pleistocene. Even though only few zoological and botanical remains were dated up till now, the epipalaeolithic stone artifacts indicate that the earliest settlers came into this region as huntrs and gatherers.

It would be worth mentioning the fact that there was not any pottery found at these sites if it was not for the finds of well developed ceramics of the wavy-line-style at Djebel Nabta close to Bir Kiseiba and the Gilf Kebir only 300 km further to the south. Here as well as on other sites in the Sudanese zone from the Nile valley to Mali the ceramics date into the 9th millennium BC. Remarkably enough none of these sites yield any of the other characteristics typical for the neolithic. More likely oriented towards the water they rather imply a lifestyle of fishermen and gatherers.

Whether, why and because of what change in their economic and cultural basis these people left their settlement areas as well as to whom they might have passed on their knowledge of achievements such as technology of pottery and in which way the transition to pastoralism took place are the main problems of prehistoric research in this region. Altogether there is a tendency towards an African variant of this crucial cultural change different from the traditional model of the beginning of food-production which implies the transition from the roaming hunter and gatherer to the settled, pottery producing farmer and herdsman. In the Sahara locally bound fishermen and gatherers who produced pottery changed their lifestyle and economic pattern by becoming nomadic herdsmen. Archaeological research lead to the conclusion that the savanna at that time still offered quantities of wild cereal. Only the decline of this resource and a concentration of the habitats in the regions of the oases and the Nile valley led to the development of cultivation.

The introduction of old world cereal cultivation is closely connected to the problem whether there was a shift of northern winter rainfalls towards the south parallel to the shift of the monsoon rain-front and where the border between those two lay. This problem is basic to all judgements about possible contacts between the northeastern Africa, the Near East and the Mediterranean. Contacts with the Middle East are suggested by late appearance of sheep and goats at the beginning of the 6th millennium BC. and also possibly by certain style of undecorated pottery in the northern Libyan desert. At the same time some technical characteristics of stone tool production appear as, e.g., the facial retouch which are to become typical elements of the neolithic and pre-dynastic Egypt several hundred years later. Northern and southern influences seem to have met somewhere close to the latitude of Dachla oasis. Here we find characteristic representatives of both regions, e.g., fine retouched arrowheads from the North and richly decorated pottery from the South without being able to say anything definite about the time sequence up to now. However a general development is discernible in which any interplay between African and Near Eastern trends creates the neolithic prerequisites for the origin of the pharaonic civilization. This development, which is later on repeated in the origin of the Egyptian state out of southern and northern cultural elements, at first takes place in the "western savanna" and after its drying up around 5000 BC. increasingly in the Nile valley. Does this indicate that Egypt is not only a gift of the Nile, as was written by Herodot, but also a gift of the desert?

According to over 500 C14 dates the human population of vast parts of the northern Libyan desert decreased in the 6th millennium BC, whereas the south still offered a habitat especially for herdsmen for several thousand years> These nomads are mentioned various times in old-Egyptian sources. They are most often referred to as environmental refugees of the increasing aridity who were seeking asylum in the Nile valley - often in vain. The Wadi Howar, a barren river of a 1000 km length, has been of special importance as a settlement area and commerce artery at the border to the Sahel. It leads from the Ennedi-Mountains in the Chad to the Nile in the south Dongola and obviously kept its importance as a mayor contact zone between inner Africa and the Nile valley until recently. The 400 km long lower reaches from Djebel Rahib eastwards to the Nile have not even been marked on the newest maps yet. The proof that the Wadi Howar was a series of at least episodically interlinked lakes up to the 2nd millennium BC was only found during the last years. This gave a new basis to all the considerations on the connections of the cultures of the Nile valley to inner Africa. Not only is the Wadi Howar important as the east-western line of commerce and as a habitat which offered abundant resources for hunting and fishing during the early holocene and later on for cattle keeping. It also had the role of mediator and transitional stage for the culture and population movement which took place in the 5th millennium triggered by the aridization of the Sahara. In this fuction it posed a sort of ecological threshold where the people could pause and their cultures develop before the inexorable expansion of the desert caught up with them.

The unusual amount of finds on the banks of the Wadi Howar was already known before the Frobenius-Expedition led by L.Almasy in 1933 and was subject to diverse speculations. In this course Frobenius posed the bold hypothesis of the Wadi being a "Yellow Nile" flowing to the north. From the beginning of the East-Sahara researches from Cologne in 1980 the plentiful ceramic and zoologic material was implied to answer questions of settlement archaeology. During the last years it was made possible by extensive systematic surveys based on detailed pottery chronology to develop first outlines of the course of occupation. According to this a direct reaction to the increasing aridity is reflected by a shift of settlement emphasis from the surrounding plains and the lower Wadi Howar to the midddle Wadi Howar and tgere from the edges to the parts situated lower Wadi Howar there from to the edges to the parts situated lower. The same is true for the statements one can make about the animal bone finds: the keeping of cattle is reduced and its place is taken by increased herding of sheep and goats which up till today find their meagre pasture next to the camels of the new Kababisch-nomads.

The further effects of the ecological transitions of the Sahara and the consequences thereof for the economy and the population movement in the more southern parts of the continent are only hardly discernible up to now. Southwards of the Wadi Howar the extensive regions of the southern Sudan are practically unexplored as regards prehistoric archaeology. East Africa is the nearest other source available, evincing herdsmanship in the 3rd millennium BC. During the same time there are the first indications of cattle keeping in western Africa..

This region is assumed to be the starting point of a language and population movement involving the whole of southern Africa. This so-called Bantu-migration is of major importance in the historic research of Africa and is also connected with the spread of economic and technological innovations. Frequently it has been tried - often neglecting the necessary source critique - to link archaeological data with and support it by linguistic reconstructions. In several aspects the debate, recalling the dilemma of the Indo-European discussion, emphasizes the necessity of confirmed dates and the immediate collaboration between linguistics and archaeology. The Cologne collaborative research centre also connects northern and southern Africa in this point of view. It focuses it's researches on the last 3000 years in which herdsmanship, pottery technology, agriculture and metallurgy made their way to the Cape. Questions concerning routes, sequence and combination of the beginning of food production in southern Africa - perhaps associated with metallurgy - pose room for many hypothesis which are now checked by archaeological fieldwork in northern Namibia.

The area archaeologically least researched is despite - or perhaps because of - this fact claimed for northern, eastern and southern immigration routes. The objective is to establish a chronological framework which will be replenished with economic and ecologic data by archaeobotany and archaeozoology. The Kaokoland in the north-west of Namibia seemed to be the most suited area for this research project, as the cattle keeping Himba, a very traditional group of the Herero people, allow an impressive insight into the traditional lifestyle of African herdsmen. The field research soon proofed the preservation and discovering conditions of open air settlement sites, where evidence of herdsmen seemed most likely, to be rather poor. On the other hand it was possible to excavate a stratigraphy in a grotto in the vicinity of Oruwanje to the west of the area capital Opuwo during the first fieldwork. This stratigraphy shows pottery finds up to a depth of one meter as well as bones from sheep and goats in several layers. Numerous botanical remains indicate a relatively constant semi-arid climate during the period of settlement which is defined by a series of C14 dates. This gives an age roughly 2000 years for the earliest appearance of pottery and livestock keeping. A date which confirms the only other early proofs of these cultural phenomenons in Nambia from the site "Geduld" about 200 km away as well as from two other excavations in South Africa.

In the further course of history a quite chequered picture of the late prehistoric development and origin of modern language and population groups enfolds in southern Africa, caused by the regional and temporal difference in appearance of cattle keeping, agriculture and metallurgy. Therefore it does not seem to be senseful to connect the beginnings of productive economy with the term "neolithic". The basic cultural historical transition which is traditionally described by "neolithic revolution" - meaning the beginning of agriculture, livestock keeping, permanent settlement and pottery technology in the Near East and Europe - most likely only took place on the African continent in this form in the Nile valley. Incidentally a look into the past as well as into the present of Africa shows that different economies and lifestyles arise in different combinations and orders. Also the development does not occur lineally, i.e. evolutionistic towards seemingly higher forms of civilization. Rather the ultimate goal was to minimize risk. Especially in arid regions people strives to spread the use of resources and in this course are even willing to return to game huntering from agriculture. Nevertheless the beginning of cattle breeding is a milestone in the different regions of Africa independent from the questiom whether the domestication of cattle was adopted from the Near East or whether it can be seen as an independent African achievement dating as early as the 9th millennium BC.

The model of holocene development in northeastern and southwestern Africa depicted above is partially based on so far unpublished results which were achieved by the DFG- collaborative research centre. Persons involved are Martin Albrecht, Hala Barakat, Hubert Berke, Helga Besler, Olaf Bubenzer, Barbara Eichhorn, Thomas Frank, Birgit Gehlen, Birgit Keding, Karin Kindermann, Stefan Kröpelin, Rudolph Kuper, Jörg Linstädter, Stefanie Nuβbaum, Jürgen Richter, Heiko Riemer, Heinz Sander, Werner Schuck, Stefan Wenzel, Ralf Vogelsang, and Barbara Zach.

Translated from German into English by Kristin Heller

Translated from English into Arabic by Osama Elnur.

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