The Archaeological Mission in the Sahara will carry out field activities in the Chott el Jerid area, in southern Tunisia (Douz, Kebili), together with laboratory activities and publication of research carried out in previous years in Tunisia and Libya.
The research will pursue the prosecution of the analyses already started on Pleistocene and Holocene environmental and cultural processes of Northern Sahara: 1) late Middle/Late Pleistocene corridors travelled by early anatomically modern humans; 2) timing and ways of human migrations in North Africa around the Holocene threshold; 3) interregional variability and the archaeological signature of Neolithic societies; 4) genetic composition and ethno-history of sedentary and mobile southern Tunisian people.
In order to get a diachronic and territorial perspective on environmental and cultural changes in desert regions, we shall excavate: i) the middle/late Pleistocene Middle Stone Age site of Wadi Lazalim; ii) the early Holocene Epipaleolithic site of Tembaine; and iii) Neolithic stone funerary monuments in the Chott.
Given the climate conditions of desert environments, such our study area, the fieldwork will be carried out in autumn (September-October). More than 35 Tunisian and Italian scientists will compose the team: archaeologists, geologists, botanists and biologists. Part of the fieldwork will be focused on training activity of young Tunisian and Italian students.
A strict security protocol will be followed, according to the indications of local institutions and the Italian Embassy in Tunis. Laboratory study of archaeological materials will consider those derived from the missions conducted in 2015-2016 and on the materials from the 2017 campaign. Other laboratory analyses will also be conducted on biological or environmental materials (including those from SW Libya), especially skeletal material presently conserved at the Museum of Anthropology of Sapienza University of Rome (DNA, stable isotopes, C14).
With the current security constraints, it is mandatory to design fieldwork programs by asking narrow and feasible research questions, answering them by investigating highly informative contexts and adopting time-saving and productive means of analysis. Remote techniques and desktop studies will help focussing and circumscribing the research areas to be tested in the field, avoiding this way the use of large-scale surveys. In the field, we will adopt an expeditious approach to research activity, like the excavation of test trenches rather than large surfaces, and also drilling deep cores for palaeoenvironmental reconstruction. Photogrammetric techniques of survey and documentation will allow postponing complex and time demanding, but necessary, drawing operations to subsequent desktop phases.
The research will attempt at explaining the evidence from different north African regions in the light of the bio-geographic relations that once linked them. Here we outline the main achievements that we foresee for each scientific objective.
The research on the Middle Stone Age (MSA) archaeology and chronology will provide elements to understand the diffusion of MSA technologies through the northern Sahara, still hardly framed within the variability of the north African scenario. Preliminary OSL dating of the MSA deposits that we have already excavated are of exceptional importance and suggest they are late Middle Pleistocene, which would assign the evidence to the fragmentary picture of the earliest dispersals of "early MSA" humans (including H. sapiens). These early contexts are represented so far by very few sites like e.g. Jebel Irhoud (Morocco), Bir Sahara and Bir Tarfawi (Egypt), Sai Island (Sudan). New data from our research will enrich a regional record with great scientific potential, already demonstrated by new discoveries carried out by international teams. Moreover, the results of our project will provide data to be discussed at a sub-continental scale, e.g. for what concerns the relations between the Mediterranean and central Saharan contexts, and at a continental scale on the diffusion of MSA techno-complexes from central eastern Africa (Sangoan, Lupemban) through north Africa, and on their later developments (Aterian, Nubian complex).
Our research on the early Holocene occupation is comprised within an ecological framework, whose most intriguing aspect is the striking contrast between the current image of a - only apparently - depopulated and lifeless region and the vegetated place it has been at different times until ca. 6000 years ago, when it started to resemble the hyperarid hot desert it is now. Data recovered from the investigation of selected early Holocene sites located within interdune basins south of the Chott el Jerid will provide further elements in support of the model proposed to explain modes and tempo of the re-peopling of the Sahara as soon as environmental conditions turned "green" ca. 11.000 years ago.
The excavation of funerary monuments through a wide and diversified region will help defining the many facets related to cultural and bio-anthropological variability of pre-protohistoric societies in this part of North Africa. In particular, the thorough and multidisciplinary skeletal biology investigation on human remains, together with the study of isotopic data to reconstruct the geological background to mobility of the studied populations, will help the understanding of population dynamics in relation to climate and environmental changes of North Sahara during the Holocene, and the reconstruction of the lifestyles of the latest Neolithic populations of the region.
By the molecular anthropology point of view, our research on the genomic structure of southern Tunisia groups (including Arab groups, Berbers and the nomads R'Baya), both at the micro-regional level and in the broader context of the Mediterranean basin, will refine the picture of a substantial difference between these populations, probable result of migration events, differential mixing, isolation and cultural assimilation.
Finally, in the international context, it is increasingly required to invest financial and cultural means in the transfer of knowledge, capacity building and skills sharing. Our project perfectly fits these requirements, by training Tunisian and Italian PhD/MA students in field methodology, with a particular focus on the valorisation of cultural assets. More specifically, it will help them acquiring or improving necessary skills in the fields of GIS elaboration of remotely acquired territorial data and management of datasets; elaboration and design of ad-hoc field research strategies; excavation and sampling of stratified contexts through different morpho-sedimentary settings typical of arid environments; means of investigation and documentation of surface sites; digital recording and treatment of archaeological contexts also by photogrammetric techniques of data acquisition and 3D modelling.