The Cyrenaican Prehistory Project 2013: the seventh season of excavations in the Haua Fteah cave

Abstract

AbstractThe paper reports the preliminary results from the short season of fieldwork that the Cyrenaican Prehistory Project was able to undertake with a small Anglo-Libyan team in September 2013. The work concentrated on continuing the excavation of Trench M down the southern side of the Middle Trench and of Trench D on the southern side of the Deep Sounding below it, the eventual objective being to link these so as to provide a high quality dataset of sedimentary and cultural data from the top to the bottom of the Pleistocene occupation deposit (some 12 m). The ~1 m of sediments investigated in Trench M in the 2013 fieldwork includes carbonate crusts possibly formed in oscillating sub-humid to arid climatic pulses, perhaps likely during Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 4, around 60,000–70,000 years ago. One of these crusts formed the base on which a hearth-like structure had been built. In Trench D evidence for human occupation appears to decline moving up the profile, coinciding with sedimentary evidence of more frequent disruptive climatic events possibly associated with latter stages of MIS 5.