J. Desmond Clark, Elizabeth J. Agrilla, Diana C. Crader, Alison Galloway, Elena A.A. Garcea, Diane Gifford-Gonzalez (general editor), David N. Hall, Andrew B. Smith & Martin A.J. Williams. Adrar Bous: archaeology of a Central Saharan granitic ring complex in Niger.

Steele, Teresa E.

J. DESMOND CLARK, ELIZABETH J. AGRILLA, DIANA C. CRADER, ALISON GALLOWAY, ELENA A.A. GARCEA, DIANE GIFFORD-GONZALEZ (general editor), DAVID N. HALL, ANDREW B. SMITH & MARTIN A.J. WILLIAMS. Adrar Bous: archaeology of a Central Saharan granitic ring complex in Niger (Studies in Human Sciences 170). 404 pages, 164 illustrations, 72 tables. 2008. Tervuren: Royal Museum for Central Africa; 978-9-0747-5243-5 paperback.

In January 1970, J. Desmond Clark and a team of colleagues set off from the village of Iferouane in the Air Mountains, located along the north-western edge of the Tenere Desert in the Central Sahara of Niger, to document the cultural sequence of the Adrar Bous granite ring formation, with the goal of investigating how prehistoric humans adapted to the environmental changes that occasionally made this dry environment more hospitable. At Adrar Bous and the surrounding area, Clark and colleagues found archaeological signatures that extended from the late Acheulian of the Middle Pleistocene through to the Middle Palaeolithic (Mousterian) and Aterian of the Late Pleistocene and into the Epipalaeolithic and Kiffian of the Terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene, culminating in the pastoralist Tenerian of the mid-Holocene. These occupations provided evidence of dramatic changes in the currently harsh environment, signalling cooler and moister periods when plants and animals, including humans, thrived in parts of the Sahara. In the years since the fieldwork, members of the project and their collaborators published many aspects of their research; however, preparation of a final comprehensive monograph did not begin in earnest until 1999, when Clark began editing and updating the existing reports and organising the other contributors to do the same. Fortunately, much progress had been made and many of Clark's contributions were complete when he passed away on 14 February 2002. At this time, Diane Gifford-Gonzalez took over editing and collating the manuscript, and she appended her own summary of the work to Clark's brief epilogue. The manuscript was completed in 2004 and published in 2008 as the present volume.

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After introductory chapters discussing the history of the project from its first inception to the final curation of the materials and completion of the monograph, the volume proceeds with a chapter on the geological setting of the region and then progresses chronologically through the sequence of archaeological industries, ending with Gifford-Gonzalez's informative summary that abstracts the main research and themes in the volume and places them in context. The chapters contain abundant data tables and artefact drawings, which will allow future archaeologists to compare their data with that of the Adrar Bous samples. The chapter on the geology, geomorphology and ancient environments (Chapter 3) is of central importance because it provides the physical, chronological, and environmental context for the assemblages. Because the occurrences are open-air, the Middle and Late Pleistocene assemblages especially can only be positioned in time based on their context and content, and the analysis of many of the assemblages was limited by the fact that these assemblages were often found in mixed or surface-collected contexts. However, the analysts found that enough material was excavated from clear stratigraphic contexts to permit distinctions between assemblages. These chapters could have benefited from additional photographs illustrating more clearly the physical context of archaeological deposits.

With the resurgence of fieldwork in North Africa and the increased attention on modern human origins, Chapter 5 on the Aterian is of interest. Here Clark argues that the occupation of the Sahara during these times allowed for connections between all regions of Africa and that the Adrar Bous and neighbouring samples may provide links between older equatorial Lupemban samples and younger coastal Aterian samples. Stratigraphic excavations at Adrar Bous did allow for the resolution of the Terminal Pleistocene and Holocene assemblages into three distinct industries, each associated with moister periods and nearby lakes: the Epipalaeolithic non-microlithic, blade-based industry with characteristic points (Chapter 6); the Kiffian microlithic industry with geometrics but no distinct point forms, with tare pottery, occasional bone points and harpoons, and aquatic faunas (Chapter 7); and the Tenerian macrolithic industry with a variety of retouched forms and with pottery, groundstone and domestic cattle (Chapter 8). The most informative chapters of the volume discuss the ceramics (Chapter 9), ground-stone (Chapter 10), fauna (Chapters 11 and 12) and human skeletons (Chapter 13), which were primarily associated with the Tenerian cattle-herders. These chapters combine to describe a distinct cultural entity that had connections and shared traditions over a large area of the Sahara.

When the Adrar Bous fieldwork was conducted, much remained unknown about the characterisation and context of the industries that were encountered. In the intervening years, more assemblages have been described, offering more comparative data and therefore allowing more detailed interpretations of the archaeology of Adrar Bous than would have been possible in the 1970s. In this way, the distance between fieldwork and publication has, for the most part, done no harm to the monograph, and the final product will still be of great value to researchers interested in the prehistory of the Central Sahara.

TERESA E. STEELE

Department of Anthropology, University of California-Davis, USA

(Email: [email protected])