Graeme Barker awarded European Research Council Advanced Investigator Grant

Cultural transformations and environmental transitions in North African prehistory

Excavating the Haua Fteah Professor Graeme Barker, Director of the McDonald Institute, has been awarded a prestigious Advanced Investigator Grant (2 million euros over 5 years) from the European Research Council for the project: “Cultural transformations and environmental transitions in North African prehistory” (TRANS-NAP). His large international team is investigating the relationship between environment and human settlement over the past 200,000 years, re-excavating the famous Haua Fteah cave in Cyrenaica, northeast Libya (excavated by Cambridge archaeologist Charles McBurney in the 1950s), and combining this with geoarchaeological and archaeological survey in the region. The project is addressing three major research questions in African and Mediterranean prehistory: when and how did Modern Humans reach North Africa? when and how did farming begin in North Africa? and to what extent was climatic change implicated in these processes?

The project is in collaboration with the Libyan Department of Antiquities, and is sponsored by the Society for Libyan Studies, which has also funded the Haua Fteah work since 2007. The ERC grant is funding two Post-doctoral Research Fellows at Cambridge (Dr Lucy Farr, working on geoarchaeology, and Dr Sacha Jones, studying stone tool technologies) and three PhD studentships, two of them being appointed this year and one next year, to work on food residues on stone tools and on two different approaches to past climates (bone isotopes, and microfauna). The ERC grant is also funding the project’s annual fieldwork in Libya, and a suite of analytical studies by other project members.

In the 2009 field season, just completed, the project has started excavating occupation deposits of ‘Pre-Aurignacian’ Middle Stone Age hunter-gatherers who camped in the Haua Fteah perhaps 75,000-100,000 years ago (the levels still have to be dated). The team has started excavating occupation deposits left by ‘Capsian’ Mesolithic hunter-gatherers in the early Holocene 8000-10,000 years ago. They found traces of domestic cereals and other domestic plants in these deposits and in a contemporary coastal cave, suggesting that Libyan hunter-gatherers were in contact with Neolithic farmers elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean. In the landscape, the team has also found prehistoric hunter-gatherers’ camp-sites of different ages from the coast to the Sahara. The potential clearly exists for the TRANS-NAP project to establish a powerful regional case study of how climate, environment, and human behaviour have articulated in North Africa over the past 200,000 years.