Excavation of an Early Neolithic Village in the Eygptian Sahara

虽然埃及最著名的是法老的文明，但从人类学的角度来看，它也很重要，因为这一时期的发展过程。数千年前，生活在波动的撒哈拉环境中的狩猎和采集人群制定了一种基于集中和广泛利用各种当地植物性食物的生存策略。这为早期定居（或半定居）的乡村生活提供了基础，并可能促进了高粱（世界主要植物作物之一）和牛的驯化。也许已知最早的陶器与这些撒哈拉人有关。温多夫博士和他的国际多学科团队所追求的研究的中心目标是追溯这一发展过程的早期新石器时代阶段，这一阶段为埃及文明奠定了基础。在国家科学基金会的支持下，他的团队将在撒哈拉沙漠的一个新石器时代早期遗址进行两个季节的实地考察。先前的工作已经揭示了一个非常早期的村庄的存在，标记为E-91-9，其中包含大量的碳化植物遗骸，许多房屋和相关的坑，以及在如此早期的占领时期发现的最大的陶器库。这项工作将集中在三个问题上：1。对谷物品种的依赖日益增加，最终成为主要的国内作物；社会组织的变化伴随着更久坐的乡村生活方式的采用；和3。陶器生产的起源。为了实现这些目标，该团队将挖掘一些存放花卉遗骸的储存坑。他们还将挖掘房屋结构及其周围地区。初步数据表明，定居点可能是有计划的，房屋结构是排成一行的。这项研究很重要，因为它将为定居村庄社会的出现和动植物驯化过程提供新的线索。它将填补埃及史前史的一个重要空白，并为许多考古学家提供感兴趣的数据。

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.