The Cyrenaican Prehistory Project 2012: the sixth season of excavations in the Haua Fteah cave

The paper reports the preliminary results from the short season of fieldwork that the Cyrenaican Prehistory Project was able to undertake with a small Anglo-Libyan team in September 2013. The work concentrated on continuing the excavation of Trench M down the southern side of the Middle Trench and of Trench D on the southern side of the Deep Sounding below it, the eventual objective being to link these so as to provide a high quality dataset of sedimentary and cultural data from the top to the bottom of the Pleistocene occupation deposit (some 12 m). The~1 m of sediments investigated in Trench M in the 2013 fieldwork includes carbonate crusts possibly formed in oscillating sub-humid to arid climatic pulses, perhaps likely during Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 4, around 60,000–70,000 years ago. One of these crusts formed the base on which a hearth-like structure had been built. In Trench D evidence for human occupation appears to decline moving up the profile, coinciding with sedimentary evidence of more frequent disruptive climatic events possibly associated with latter stages of MIS 5. Introduction The Cyrenaican Prehistory Project is investigating the history of climate, environment and human settlement in the Gebel Akhdar or ‘Green Mountain’ massif of Cyrenaica in north-east Libya over the past c. 150,000 years (150 ka), the approximate length of time that anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) are thought to have been present in North Africa (Garcea 2010; Hublin and McPherron 2011). The project began in 2007 with sponsorship by and funding from the Society for Libyan Studies, which have continued ever since, but from 2009 the principal funding for the fieldwork and analytical programme has been from the European Research Council and within the terms of this funding the project is known by the acronym TRANS-NAP, standing for ‘Cultural Transformations and Environmental Transitions in North African prehistory’. The nature and scale – and success or otherwise – of human responses to changes in climate and environment are of particular interest in the context of three major episodes in North African prehistory. The first is the initial colonisation of the region by Homo sapiens, the first fossil evidence for which is c. 200 ka in East and South Africa, with their expansion into North Africa generally thought to be linked to humid climatic phases in Pleistocene climate, in particular Marine Isotope Stage 5 or MIS 5 dated to c. 130–74 ka, when there were lakes and rivers in the Sahara (Armitage et al. 2007; Drake et al. 2011; Garcea 2010; Osborne et al. 2008). The second is the nature of human responses to the ensuing climatic instability of MIS 4–2: MIS 4 (c. 74–60 ka) and MIS 3 (c. 60–24 ka) were characterised especially by spatio-temporal variability in climate, culminating in an overall peak of aridity within the Last Glacial Maximum (MIS 2, c. 24–18 ka), which was followed by sharp climatic fluctuations associated with deglaciation processes leading up to the Pleistocene/ Holocene boundary c. 11.5 ka. The third research area concerns the timing and routes of dispersal of plant and animal domesticates in the Early Holocene (c. 11.5–7.5 ka) and the timing and nature of the transition from hunting and gathering (foraging) to farming at this time, another period of marked climatic instability characterised especially by relatively humid conditions in the Early Holocene followed by the development of the present-day semi-arid climate in the Mid Holocene. To address these questions the project has combined the re-excavation of the Haua Fteah cave with a programme of geoarchaeological survey across a transect of terrain that stretches for ~75 km southwards from the coast (where the Haua Fteah is located) over the Gebel Akhdar hills (which reach to just under 1000 m above sea level) to the edge of the Saharan desert (Jones et al. 2011). The Haua Fteah is a dry shelter measuring ~80 m wide by ~50 m deep that faces north to the Mediterranean sea about a kilometre away. Between 1951 and 1955 the Cambridge prehistorian Charles McBurney conducted a major series of excavations in the sediments flooring the cave (McBurney 1967). He found a deep (~14 m) sequence of human 1 McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, UK 2 Canterbury Archaeological Trust, UK 3 Department of Antiquities, Shahat (Cyrene), Libya Libyan Studies 45 (2014), pp 163–173 © The Society for Libyan Studies doi:10.1017/lis.2014.2