Adrar Bous, Central Sahara (1970)

Abstract

I join the British Army expedition to the Air Mountains led by Major David Hall, Royal Engineers, and travel out to Africa via Valletta in Malta and Mount Etna and Palermo in Sicily. I meet distinguished prehistoric archaeologist Professor Desmond Clark (University of California, Berkeley) at Carthage (Tunisia) on New Year’s Eve, 1969. The expedition travels by Land Rover through Tunisia and Algeria and south across the Sahara via Tamanrasset (Algeria) and Agades (Niger), before the archaeological team drives north through the arid Air Mountains to the small mountain oasis of Iferouane. Desmond Clark and I set forth by camel with a Tuareg guide for Adrar Bous, an isolated mountain in the Tenere Desert of Niger, finding Neolithic pots and stone tools on the surface as we go. On our first morning at Adrar Bous we spot a horn core of what proves to be a complete Neolithic domestic cow that died in a small swamp some five thousand years ago. We locate and excavate Early, Middle and Late Stone Ages sites together with abundant Neolithic remains, and map the shorelines of two early Holocene lakes. Andy Smith and I explore the Air Mountains by camel with a local Tuareg guide in search of prehistoric rock art. Evidence mounts of a series of wetter and drier phases extending back to at least five hundred thousand years ago associated with sporadic prehistoric human occupation in what is now the arid geographical heart of the Sahara.