Aerial view of Oued Beit ridges and rivers, highlighted in colour. Courtesy of Toby Wilkinson
Archaeological research in Morocco has uncovered the oldest known farming society in Northwest Africa’s previously poorly understood prehistory.
The study, published today in the journal Antiquity, is the first to shed light on the importance of the Maghreb (northwest Africa) in the emergence of complex societies across the Mediterranean.
With its Mediterranean environment, border with the Sahara Desert and the shortest sea route linking Africa and Europe, the Maghreb region is perfectly positioned to have been a centre of major cultural development and intercontinental connections in the past.
The importance of the region during the Paleolithic, Iron Age and Islamic periods is well known, but there are major gaps in knowledge about the archaeology of the Maghreb from around 4000 to 1000 BC, a period of dynamic change across much of the Mediterranean.
To address this, Youssef Bokbot (INSAP), Cyprian Broodbank (University of Cambridge) and Giulio Lucarini (CNR-ISPC and ISMEO) conducted joint interdisciplinary archaeological fieldwork in Oued Beht, Morocco.
Professor Broodbank said: “For more than 30 years I have been convinced that Mediterranean archaeology was missing something fundamental in late prehistoric North Africa. Now we finally know that we were right, and can start to think in new ways that acknowledge the powerful contribution of Africans to the emergence and interaction of early Mediterranean societies.”
The authors state: “For more than a century, the last great unknown in late Mediterranean prehistory was the role played by societies along the southern Mediterranean African coast west of Egypt. Our findings demonstrate that this gap is due not to a lack of major prehistoric activity but to a relative paucity of research and publication. Oued Beit now affirms the central role of the Maghreb in the emergence of Mediterranean and African societies.”
These results make it clear that this was the largest agricultural complex of this period in Africa outside the Nile Valley. All evidence points to the existence of a large agricultural settlement of a similar size to that of Troy in the Early Bronze Age.
The team found an unprecedented number of Final Neolithic domesticated plant and animal remains, pottery and stone tools. The excavations also uncovered evidence of numerous deep storage pits.
Importantly, similar mines from the same period have been found on the other side of the Strait of Gibraltar in the Iberian Peninsula, where ivory and ostrich eggs have been found, long suggesting links to Africa, suggesting that the Maghreb played an important role in the wider development of the western Mediterranean during the 4th millennium BC.
Oued Bet and the northwestern Maghreb were clearly an integral part of the overall Mediterranean region, so these discoveries profoundly change our understanding of the subsequent prehistory of the Mediterranean and Africa.
The authors of the Antiquity article state that “it is important to consider Oued Beht within a broader framework of co-evolution and connectivity that encompasses peoples on both sides of the Mediterranean-Atlantic gateway between the late 4th and 3rd millennium BC, and, although there was potential for mobility in both directions, it needs to be recognised as a distinctive African-based community that contributed significantly to the shaping of its social world.”
Further information: Antiquity (2024). DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2024.101
Provided by University of Cambridge
Citation: Previously Unknown Neolithic Society Discovered in Morocco: North Africa’s Role in Mediterranean Prehistory (September 23, 2024) Retrieved September 23, 2024 from https://phys.org/news/2024-09-previously-unknown-neolithic-society-morocco.html
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