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Resisters, Vacillators or Laggards? Reconsidering the First Farmer-Herders in Prehistoric Egypt

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Journal of World Prehistory Aims and scope

Abstract

This article discusses the diffusion of food production from the Levant to Egypt in the Early–Middle Holocene. It attempts to explain how the diffusion and adoption of food production occurred in Egypt in light of optimal foraging theory, niche construction theory and innovation diffusion models. It disputes an old argument that Southwest Asian domesticates appeared late in Egypt and played only a minor role in its inhabitants’ subsistence. The primary focus is on the Fayum in northern Egypt, where the earliest-dated Southwest Asian domesticated cereal remains in Egypt were found together with cultivation-related tools and facilities. Circumstantial evidence suggests that the beginning of food production in the Fayum was not as late as previously thought, and that the subsequent development of food production should be seen as a response to the increasing imbalance between the growing human population and the limited wild food resources available in the Middle Holocene. Lithic evidence strongly indicates that people in the Fayum exerted every possible effort to make food production feasible and efficient with the aid of technology in the course of a millennium, starting in the early-to-mid 6th millennium BC.

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Acknowledgements

This article is an outcome of research on the beginning and development of food production in Neolithising Egypt, which was made possible by the Marie Curie post-doctoral fellowship of the Gerda Henkel Foundation’s M4HUMAN Programme (AZ45/EU/12) and was based in the Institute of Archaeology at University College London. I sincerely appreciate their support. I would like to thank all of the staff of the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan in the British Museum, the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology at UCL, and the UCL Institute of Archaeology Collections for accommodating my research on Gertrude Caton-Thompson’s Fayum lithic collection. I would also like to thank the editors and reviewers of Journal of World Prehistory for the comments on an earlier manuscript of this article.

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    Noriyuki Shirai

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Shirai, N. Resisters, Vacillators or Laggards? Reconsidering the First Farmer-Herders in Prehistoric Egypt. J World Prehist 33, 457–512 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10963-020-09148-y

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