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

早全新世（EH）在北非和撒哈拉的狩猎-采集者-渔民社区从大约10.5千万年显示出非常相似的物质文化和社会经济模式在广阔的地理和时间范围内。通常将其解释为快速流行病扩张的结果，但人们对传播的实际动态、促进和维持北非东部地区物质文化同质性的潜在文化传播过程、接触和网络，以及不同群体在假定的初始扩散过程后是否以及为何保持相似的文化特征，仍然知之甚少。EHSCAN的目的是确定这种长期存在是由于文化变化的缓慢速度，还是与更高水平的群体间连通性有关，假设存在一个活跃的大规模互动网络。为了解决这些问题，它建议开发一种结合生成推理框架和地质统计分析的统计和空间方法，以建立和探索导致北非考古文化之间差异或相似的过程，以及负责这些文化传播的微观尺度过程。通过系统地组合和分析独立获取的数据集以及近似贝叶斯计算的应用，通过多代理方法，它将比较和分析与更广泛的撒哈拉有关的物质文化组合，以观察特定文化特征传播的时空动态。基于两种主要的考古代用物，陶器和放射性碳测年，它将测试这些过程中不同因素的影响，并为北非EH定居历史定义新的模型和范式。它将扩大撒哈拉史前史的概念和解释框架，并通过其产出为非洲考古研究提供新的数据集和工具。

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.