# From the Big Dry to the Holocene in Eastern Africa and beyond. Foreword

Joséphine Lesur, Jessie Cauliez, Lamya Khalidi, Laurent Bruxelles, Isabelle Crevecoeur, David Pleurdeau, Chantal Tribolo, François Bon

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Joséphine Lesur, Jessie Cauliez, Lamya Khalidi, Laurent Bruxelles, Isabelle Crevecoeur, et al.. From the Big Dry to the Holocene in Eastern Africa and beyond. Foreword. Joséphine Lesur; Jessie Cauliez; Lamya Khalidi; Laurent Bruxelles; Isabelle Crèvecoeur; David Pleurdeau; Chantal Tribolo; François Bon. Du Big Dry à l'Holocène en Afrique de l'Est et au-delà / From the Big Dry to the Holocene in Eastern Africa and beyond, 20, Société Préhistorique Française, pp.11-12, 2023, Séances de la Société Préhistorique Française. hal-04789421

HAL Id: hal-04789421

https://hal.science/hal-04789421v1

Submitted on 31 Aug 2025

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Du Big Dry à l'Holocène en Afrique de l'Est et au-delà
From the Big Dry to the Holocene in Eastern Africa and beyond
Actes de la séance de la Société préhistorique française de Toulouse (septembre 2019)
Textes publiés sous la direction de Joséphine Lesur, Jessie Cauliez, Lamya Khalidi, Laurent Bruxelles, Isabelle Crevecoeur, David Pleurdeau, Chantal Tribolo et François Bon Paris, Société préhistorique française, 2023
(Séances de la Société préhistorique française, 20), p. 11-12
www.prehistoire.org
ISSN : 2263-3847 – ISBN : 2-913745-93-8

## Foreword

J. LESUR, J. CAULIEZ, L. KHALIDI, L. BRUXELLES,
I. CREVECOEUR, D. PLEURDEAU, C. TRIBOLO et F. BON

This publication brings together a number of contributions from the autumn session of the Société Préhistorique Française conference entitled *Cultural dynamics and landscape transformation in a rapidly changing continent: from the Big Dry to the Holocene in Eastern Africa, that took place in Toulouse in September 2019*.

In Eastern Africa, environmental conditions are often put forward to explain the mechanisms underlying technological, cultural, social or economic changes in human societies and the populations that make them up, or, on the contrary, their persistence. In the context of recent prehistory, ecology and climate are believed to have played a major role in enduring predation-based economies for example, or, conversely, in the emergence of animal and plant domestication and thus the adoption of new foodways by human societies.

To better understand the role of ecology and climate in human socio-cultural trajectories, we focused our attention on the cultural dynamics of societies and their relation to environmental and landscape transformations in the Nile and the East African Rift valleys, from the end of the Pleistocene to the Late Holocene, starting with a major cold and arid period known as the 'Big Dry' or Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). This period occurred between ~ 29 ka and 19 ka and led to the extension of desertic zones, the lowering of sea and lake levels and the reduction of vegetation cover. The Rift valley has yielded few sites for this period, suggesting population refugia into more ideal ecozones, as seems to have been the case in the Nile valley, or the erasure of archaeological evidence as a result of erosive phenomena that occurred contemporary with or subsequent to this climatic episode. Milder and wetter conditions were established everywhere during the African Humid Period (~ 15 ka-5 ka), accompanied by an increase in hunter-gatherer sites, but here again, we find strong contrasts in the records provided by these two geographic contexts. Between the ninth and first millennia BP, the first transitions towards food production and animal domestication began to occur in these same valleys, once again at very different rhythms and in very different ways.

Due to the mosaic of available ecosystems and the diverse geographies and topographies of these regions, from high altitude mountains and scrub forest, to desertic plains and lacustrine and marine environments, societies adopted polymorphic adaptability strategies. These transitions occurred at considerably different periods of time, depending on the region. Similarly, clear divergences in technical innovations are observed, highlighting the different trajectories of societies that may have been connected at certain times and isolated at others and whose subsistence and mobility was partially adapted to changing landscapes affected by hydroclimatic shifts of contrasting amplitude. With the gradual transition to more diversified food production economies, the accumulation and storage of foodstuffs, partially influenced by environmental conditions and resources, becomes a central question. We observe the emergence of secondary husbandry practices in semi-sedentary societies relying on fishing, as well as in hunter-gatherer societies with different degrees of mobility.

New archaeological and environmental data from the East African Rift and Nile valley regions and beyond, which are brought together in this session, demonstrate the plurality of economic subsistence strategies and settlement dynamics that occured arhythmically across the continent during this period, against a backdrop of environmental biodiversity. Through the many contributions presented here, we witness societal change and landscape transformation through different prisms, including those of climate and environment, but also those of economy, demography, technical traditions and human cultural expressions. This issue provides a rare exploration of the multiple expressions of these transformations as well as a window into the changes in dynamic anthroposystems across the African continent.
The first part of this volume focuses on cultural dynamics and landscape transformation from the Big Dry to the Holocene by treating archaeological work currently carried out in the Nile Valley and the East African Rift. The second part focuses on the presentation of regional syntheses to enlarge the theme to the scale of the African continent.

The entire publication is a tribute to our colleague, Professor X. Gutherz for his major contributions to the archaeology and prehistory of the Horn of Africa.

We would like to thank the Société Préhistorique française for editing and publishing this volume and the Université de Toulouse Jean Jaurès for hosting the conference which led to this publication. We also thank a number of institutions and agencies for having funded this volume and supported the archaeological programs in the Nile Valley and the Horn of Africa whose results are presented here, including: UMR 5199 (PACEA), 5608 (TRACES), 6034 (Archéosciences Bordeaux), 7194 (HNHP), 7209 (AASPE), 7264 (CEPAM), l'Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-14-CE31) and the UCA JEDI (ANR-15-IDEX-0) Project, the LabEx LaScArBx-AAP5-2015 (Université de Bordeaux), the Ministère de l'Europe et des Affaires Étrangères (MEAE), the Site d'Étude en Écologie Globale (SEEG) of the INEE CNRS, the French Embassy in the Republic of Djibouti, the Institut des Déserts et des Steppes, the Ministère de l'Enseignement Supérieur et de la Recherche djiboutien, the Institut de Recherches Archéologiques et Historiques (IRAH) of Djibouti, the Centre Français des Études Éthiopiennes (CFEE), the Ethiopian Authority for Research and Conservation of Cultural Heritage (ARCCH), the Afar Bureau for Tourism and Heritage, and the IRP ABASC (CNRS-INEE).