This book describes the major results of a environments of the Western Desert of Egypt and the human exploitation of these environments, The area studied is today one of the driest and least hospitable on earth, with virtually no rainfall, extremely high temperatures during much of the year, and seemingly devoid of all life except near widely scattered wells or oases. While primarily designed as a study in prehistory and paleoecology, this book will be of interest to anyone concerned with arid lands, with their environments, and with hyperaridity. It will also be useful for those interested in the prehistory of North Africa, and the origins of Egyptian civilization.
The logistical problems of working in the eastern Sahara are such that information of the kind given here Following a brief description of the research methods and the modern environment, the main body of the book is concerned with the presentation of data from five widely separated localities. For each locality the lithostratigraphic sequence is given first, followed by a detailed consideration of the associated archaeology.
These data are then used to reconstruct both the environmental sequence of the West em Desert and the pattern of human exploitation of the area, and to compare these with data available from else where in North Africa. The final chapter deals with the origin of food production in northeast Africa, and the implications that the early occurrence of this phenomenon in the eastern Sahara has for theories concerning the “causes" of food production.
Finally, the book concludes with 10 appendixes wherein the reader may find more detailed data on the regional geology, the ceramics, stylistic and locational studies, faunal and floral remains, human skeletal material, and the radiocarbon dates discussed in the preceding body of the book.