Department of Classics and Archaeology
Faculty of Arts
New light from Oued Beht, Morocco, on the later prehistory of Mediterranean Africa
Cyprian Broodbank, Giulio Lucarini, Youssef Bokbot
17.00-18.00, 30 May 2025
Campus Hub, Building 0, Room 318, University of Malta
Cyprian Broodbank is Disney Professor of Archaeology, University of Cambridge
Giulio Lucarini is Senior Researcher at the National Research Council (CNR, Italy)
Youssef Bokbot is Senior Researcher at Institut national des sciences de l'archéologie et du Patrimoine (INSAP, Morocco)
The later prehistory of Mediterranean Africa west of Egypt has long been a blind-spot in both Mediterranean and wider African archaeology. This is especially true of the last few millennia BCE, prior to Phoenician and Greek activity, when it appears at odds with the rich evidence for dramatic social changes elsewhere in the Copper to Bronze Age Mediterranean, as well as along the Nile. Recent analyses, however, highlight the potential dynamism of this region's trajectories over this time-span. Particularly promising is the northwestern Maghreb, a fully Mediterranean environment comparable to Iberia and other regions to the north of the sea. New fieldwork by a collaborative British-Italian-Moroccan team at the Moroccan site of Oued Beht has now identified a complex agriculturally-based society that flourished between ca. 3400 and 2900 BC, with indications of close contacts with southern Iberia and the Sahara. Many aspects of the site's interpretation remain provisional and subject to ongoing fieldwork and analysis, but already the outline of a new Maghrebian later prehistory can be advocated.
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