EHSCAN-Exploring Early Holocene Saharan Cultural Adaptation and social Networks through socio-ecological inferential modelling.

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Early Holocene (EH) hunter-gatherer-fisher communities in North Africa and the Sahara from ca. 10.5 kya display very similar material cultural and socioeconomic patterning over a vast geographical and temporal range. Explained generally as the outcome of a rapid demic expansion, the actual dynamics of spread, the underlying cultural processes of transmission, contacts and networks which prompted and sustained the material cultural homogeneity in EH North Africa are still poorly understood, as are whether and why different groups maintained similar cultural traits after a putative initial dispersal process. EHSCAN aims to determine whether this long-term persistence was due to slow rates of cultural change or rather related to higher levels of inter-group connectivity, assuming the presence of an active large-scale network of interactions. To tackle these issues, it proposes to develop a statistical and spatial approach combining a generative inference framework and geostatistical analyses to establish and explore the processes that led to differences or similarities between North African archaeological cultures as well as the micro-scale processes responsible for cultural transmission within those. Via a multi-proxy approach by the systematic combination and analysis of independently acquired datasets and the application of approximate Bayesian computation it will compare and analyse material culture assemblages pertaining to the wider Sahara to observe spatial and temporal dynamics of the diffusion of specific cultural traits. Based on two main archaeological proxies, pottery, and radiocarbon dates, it will test the influence of different factors in those processes and define new models and paradigms for the EH settlement history in North Africa. It will broaden the conceptual and interpretative framework of Saharan prehistory and offer through its outputs new datasets and tools to African archaeological research.