While Egypt is best known for the civilization of the pharaohs, from an anthropological perspective it is also significant because of the developmental processes which proceeded this period. Thousands of years earlier hunting and gathering populations living in a fluctuating Saharan environment developed a subsistence strategy based on focused and extensive utilization of a wide range of local plant foods. This provided the basis for early settled (or semi-settled) village life and likely contributed to the domestication of sorghum, one of the world's major plant crops, and cattle. Perhaps the earliest known pottery is associated with such Saharan populations. A central goal of the research pursued by Dr. Wendorf and his international multidisciplinary team is to trace the early, Neolithic stages of this developmental process which established the groundwork for Egyptian civilization. With National Science Foundation support his team will conduct two seasons of fieldwork at an early Neolithic site in the Saharan Desert. Prior work has revealed the presence of an extremely early village, labeled E-91-9, which contains abundant carbonized plant remains, numerous houses and associated pits and the largest corpus of pottery yet found at such an early period of occupation. The work will focus on three issues: 1. The development of increasing reliance on cereal species that eventually became major domestic crops: 2. The changes in social organization that accompanied the adoption of a more sedentary village way of life; and 3. The origins of pottery production. To accomplish these goals, the team will excavate a number of storage pits which contain floral remains. They will also excavate house structures and the areas surrounding them. Preliminary data indicates that the settlement may be planned and that house structures are arranged in a row pattern. This research is important because it will shed new light on the emergence of settled village societies and the processes involved in the domestication of plants and animals. It will fill an important gap in the prehistory of Egypt and provide data of interest to many archaeologists.
