Optimal adjustment or cultural backwardness? New data on the latest Levallois industries in the Nile Valley

Abstract

Notwithstanding the ample evidence and abundant hypotheses corroborating the crucial significance of the central part of the Nile Valley in the spread of early cultures of Anatomically Modern Humans, research on the prehistory of the region remains insufficient. Investigations at the complex of sites around Affad (Southern Dongola Reach, Sudan) has furnished vital information about the functioning of human groups whose adaptation and technology corresponded to the MSA model even in the Terminal Pleistocene (c. 16–15 ka). A question therefore arises as to whether such a late presence of these groups mirrors the optimum adaptation to environmental conditions or rather the lack of other (cultural) factors of change. Both dynamic environmental changes and the influx of LSA communities from the Mediterranean region accelerated such changes in the case of Nubia – a territory located just a few hundred kilometres to the north.While the technological analysis and typology of the flint inventory yielded by Affad 23 has demonstrated the dominance of schemes of preferential Levallois production, it has not revealed any presence of the ‘transitional’ elements toward blade-based methods. Furthermore, the archaeological record from Affad is argued to contain elements attesting to the training character of several processes of working chert nodules. Well-preserved original spatial relations have also enabled the identification of areas suggested to be dedicated to the selection of raw materials, the manufacture of tools, the use of implements and training in how to make them.