Ricerc@Sapienza

The Archaeological Mission in the Sahara will carry out field activities in Tunisia in the Chott el Jerid, the Grand Erg Oriental, the Dahar (governorates of Kebili and Tataouine) and in the Wadi Serrat (el Kef). Laboratory activities, dissemination and publications are integral part of the research.
The project continues the study on past environmental and cultural trajectories at late Quaternary contexts in the Northern Sahara and the pre-desert to understand key evolutive and population dynamics: the appearance of the earliest H. sapiens and their material correlates (c. 300 ka); the introduction of food production economies and the interactions with the last hunter-gatherers in the early Holocene (c. 11,000 calBP); the network of contacts revealed by late prehistoric funerary traditions; the genetic composition and ethno-history of sedentary and mobile communities.
To achieve the objectives of the project, we shall excavate: i) the middle/late Pleistocene sequence of Wadi Lazalim; ii) the early Holocene contexts of Tembaine and Wadi Serrat; iii) the Neolithic funerary monuments in the Chott and the Erg.
Field activities are carefully scheduled in the framework of an organically conceived territorial project, but could shift from area to area after the security advice of the Italian Embassy in Tunis.
Given the COVID-19 pandemic, the fieldwork is flexibly scheduled in a long mission in autumn 2020 (October-November) or early 2021. Around 30 Tunisian and Italian scientists and students will compose the team: archaeologists, geologists, botanists and biologists. The fieldwork will also focus on the training of Tunisian and Italian students. We shall also continue the analyses on archaeological materials from the missions 2015-2019, plus the 2020 campaign. Other laboratory analyses will be conducted on biological and skeletal material from SW Libya currently curated at the Museum of Anthropology of Sapienza University of Rome (DNA, stable isotopes, C14).