Agriculture without sedentism? Technological organisation and mobility strategy of stone tool makers in the Fayum Neolithic, Egypt

This research project is an archaeological study of the beginning of agriculture in the Fayum in Egypt. The beginning of agriculture in human history has drawn a great deal of archaeological interest, and many studies have attempted to answer how and why Palaeolithic foragers abandoned their traditional way of providing subsistence by developing or adopting agriculture. However, little is known about the Palaeolithic-Neolithic transition in Egypt, even though domesticated plants like wheat and barley as well as domesticated animals like sheep and goats are thought to have been diffused from the Levant. Owing to better preservation of the landscape, previous researchers could find several sites of Palaeolithic-Neolithic periods in the Fayum, which is a fertile depression centring on Lake Qarun in the limestone plateau of the Egyptian Western Desert. Although it is widely accepted that the Fayum Neolithic is the earliest manifestation of farming culture in Egypt, there is no clear image of how prehistoric people introduced agriculture, because research so far has concentrated on relatively small areas. The research question to be answered is whether the lack of evidence for dwellings should be interpreted as a dependence of the people in Neolithic Fayum on agriculture without establishing permanent settlements. While permanent settlements seem to have been a precondition for the emergence of domesticates in the Levant, no clear evidence of solid dwellings has been found in the Fayum Neolithic, even after the adoption of the domesticates from the Levant. Therefore, the goal of the research is to understand if the situation of Neolithic Fayum should be explained as the effect of taphonomic process or a reflection of agriculture without sedentism. This research will contribute to the question by focusing on stone tools left by Fayum Neolithic people. Careful examination of the distribution, density and diversity of lithic raw materials, stone tools and their debris in the Fayum may give reliable information about the location of residential and task sites of Neolithic people, even if solid dwellings and other structures did not exist or if they were not preserved. In addition, use-wear analysis and residue analysis of the tools may also help to interpret for what purposes the people visited and stayed at different locations in the Fayum. This approach can shed new light on the use and character of different locations in the Fayum in relation to the incorporation of agriculture into local subsistence strategy.