The Lower Palaeolithic

Many Lower Palaeolithic artefacts, including numerous handaxes of Acheulean type, have been found in and on local gravel deposits. No human bones have been found in Egypt in association with this Acheulean phase, but Homo erectus can probably be assumed to have been the maker of these artefacts. Misunderstanding of the desert geomorphology has led many researchers to believe that the Acheulean can be correlated with a Nile terrace chronology, but this is unfortunately not the case. We can presume, however, that Homo erectus at least passed by regularly and left his handaxes at numerous sites. Pedimentation and fluviatile erosion led to the dispersal of most of the handaxes and their related artefacts. It is, therefore, not exceptional to find Acheulean handaxes on the present surface of the desert areas in the Nile Valley. In the early twentieth century, the hills over which a path leads from Deir el-Medina to the Valley of the Kings, overlooking the western side of Luxor, were particularly popular for ‘collecting’ handaxes: although these stray finds cannot be dated, they are probably all that remain, after intensive erosion, of large Acheulean sites. At some locations, such as Nag Ahmed el-Khalifa, near Abydos, it has proved possible to observe that artefacts remained grouped together, even when they were no longer in their original context. There, and in other parts of the Qena region, such handaxe concentrations occur on top of the first clay deposits that attest the connection of the river Nile with its headwaters in Ethiopia. We presume that the age of those concentrations should be set at about 400,000-300,000 bp, but this is only a guess. In order to document the Acheulean occupation properly, we would need more information about such factors as the original spatial distribution and the associated faunal remains.

Our knowledge of prehistoric Nubia is comparatively well documented as a result of the rescue excavations carried out in the 1960s, before most of the area was flooded by Lake Nasser. Acheulean handaxe concentrations occurred mainly on ‘inselbergs’ (eroded hilltops), where it was possible to extract a good raw material: ferruginous sandstone. Since such sites remained exposed on the surface for many hundred thousands of years, we should not expect any remains to have survived apart from lithics. Even in the case of the lithics, we have only limited information and no secure means of dating except by typological approaches. According to these typologies, the sites can be assigned to Early, Middle, and Late Acheulean respectively. It is remarkable that cleavers, so characteristic for the rest of Africa, are lacking in the assemblages, suggesting that, in Acheulean times, Nubia probably constituted a particular province, an original enclave, in the African interior.

In the Western Desert, several Final Acheulean sites are known, especially at the oases of Kharga and Dakhla and at Bir Sahara and Bir Tarfawi. These sites are located on the scarps surrounding the oases, but the most important finds are associated with fossil springs in the floor of the oasis depressions or in the playa deposits. All of these sites are clearly related to wetter conditions, when life as hunter-gatherers was possible. Most of the known sites are in a bad state of preservation, but it has been suggested that ancient channels in the Western Desert, discovered by radar from the space shuttle, are rich in well-preserved Acheulean sites, none of which has yet been excavated.