Some of the first artifactual finds from the region called the ‘Western’ or ‘Libyan’ Desert and ‘the
Sudan’ were documented by Ralph A. Bagnold and members of the Long Range Desert Group, a British army unit active during World War II. In the 1930s, excavations on Lake Qarun-Fayum and the Kharga Oases by Gertrude Caton-Thompson and Elinor Gardiner provided the first integrated investigations into the prehistory and palaeoenvironment of the region; ironically these women were not granted membership into the Royal Geographical Society, although their reports have stood the test of time and paved the way for later researchers. Field studies in the 1970s by the Combined Prehistoric Expedition discovered some important stratified sites of Middle Stone Age-Early/Middle Palaeolithic typology, which predate the last phase of glaciation. Aterian artifacts at the site at Bir Tirfawi, for example, are interstrat-ified with calcareous lake beds that likely date to the period 125 000-90 000 years ago. Farther to the north, the Dakhleh Oasis Project has studied the remains of several prehistoric periods (Aterian through Graeco-Roman) since the 1980s. Acheulian hand ax finds older than 300 000 years were documented in the Bir Kiseiba and Selima Sand Sheet regions by Smithsonian Institution researchers conducting fieldwork in the 1990s. Today, various international teams of scientists continue to decipher prehistoric archives from the Gilf Kebir, the defunct former tributaries of the Nile in northern Sudan, the Tibesti and Fezzan, and the Niger and Chad Basin.
World History
