Ricerc@Sapienza

Rock art sites of Tadrart Acacus represent an outstanding record of ancient human groups who lived in the central Saharan region during the Holocene, from the early hunting-gathering communities to the emergence of the first Pastoral society, to the development of the Garamantian state, until the Tuareg occupation. The subjects and scenes are painted and engraved on cliffs, isolated boulders or on the walls of rock-shelters, and in the rare deep caves. They mainly represent animals and humans, both isolated, in groups and performing daily or ritual activities.

Rock art is one of the most significant aspects of Saharan cultural heritage. The recent critical political developments determined the inaccessibility of many sites, raising the risk of destruction of the artworks, already significantly endangered by natural and anthropic threats. It is urgent to propose concrete actions to improve the understanding of this heritage and raise awareness of its extraordinary value, as a testimony of the past, as well as a resource for the future.

The Pierres de Ben Barour, also known as trapping or tethering stones (TS), are stone artefacts
with notches or grooves usually interpreted as hunting devices on the basis of rock art
engravings. Though their presence is a peculiar feature of desert landscapes from the
Sahara to the Arabian Peninsula, we know little about their age, context and function. Here
we present a new approach to the study of these artefacts based on a large dataset (837
items) recorded in the Messak plateau (SW Libya). A statistically-based geoarchaeological

The human selection of food plants cannot always have been aimed exclusively at isolating the traits typical of domesticated species today. Each phase of global change must have obliged plants and humans to cope with and develop innovative adaptive strategies. Hundreds of thousands of wild cereal seeds from the Holocene ‘green Sahara’ tell a story of cultural trajectories and environmental instability revealing that a complex suite of weediness traits were preferred by both hunter-gatherers and pastoralists.

The chapter explains the main features of desert environemnts and their significance in the archaeological field.

Starting from its title, this volume highlights the importance of environmental
changes and emphasizes the central contribution to archaeology in the research carried
out in the oasis of Farafra, in the Egyptian Western Desert, under the coordination of
Barbara Barich and Fekri Hassan between 1990 and 2005. The book consists of 7 parts
and is divided into 19 chapters, together with an introduction and a concluding section,
for a total of about 500 pages.

First visited by westerners in the mid-nineteenth century, Saharan rock art has since received a great deal of attention. The richness and diversity of this region is recognised by the inclusion on the UNESCO World Heritage list of three properties: Tassili-n-Ajjer in Algeria, Tadrart Acacus in Libya, and Ennedi in Chad.

The chapter summarized the main climatic, environmental and archaeological phenomena of Holocene central Sahara.

As part of the Tunisian-Italian archaeological joint mission to the Sahara, a research project (survey and excavation) has focused since 2015 on the study of the funerary archaeology of the prehistoric and historical communities of southern Tunisia. The surveyed area, located along the southern and eastern edges of Chott el Jerid (governorate of Kebili), was selected, after scrutinizing the information collected by the “Service Géographique de l’Armée Française” during the early 20th century about the funerary structures.

The abundant faunal remains from the Takarkori rock shelter in the Tadrart Acacus region of southwestern Libya are described. The material that covers the period between 10,200 to 4650 years cal BP illustrates the more humid environmental conditions in the Central Sahara during early and middle Holocene times. Particular attention is focussed on the aquatic fauna that shows marked diachronic changes related to increasing aridification.