mediterranean “prehistory” 49
transformed the Sahara from a late Pleistocene barrier desert into a vast, game-rich
patchwork of lakes, running wadis, savannah and residual arid zones, into which
hunter-gatherers swiftly percolated from all directions. As a consequence of this, most
of the people in Mediterranean Africa probably still largely kept their backs to the sea.
Between roughly 5500 and 3500, the very different ramifications of these early
Holocene trajectories played out across the Mediterranean, with the injection of
several further innovations, notably metallurgy in parts of the north and east and pas-
toralism in the African south. We can continue first in North Africa. In the west, the
long-term outcome of the first farming enclave remains obscure, and despite the fact
that the Maghreb is environmentally closely comparable to, say, Iberia, the lack of
evidence for a major efflorescence of agricultural communities is hard to attribute
entirely to admittedly much lower levels of archaeological prospection. Egypt, on the
other hand, saw a gradually increased reliance upon domesticates, and by the start of
the fourth millennium farming had become the staple way of life along the Nile, with
explosive demographic consequences on rich alluvial land. But equally influential in
up-river Egypt, and those stretches of Mediterranean Africa that remained untouched
by cereal cultivation, was a further Saharan development, namely the emergence of
mobile pastoralism, based around arguably locally domesticated cattle, plus sheep and
goats of ultimately Levantine descent, all of which gradually filtered into the coastal
zone too. Turning to the European flank of the Mediterranean, the scene is entirely
different. Neolithic villages were tightly packed into the most fertile regions of Iberia,
southern France, Italy and the Aegean, creating myopic, localized cultural landscapes,
within which the first metal objects slotted into existing material vocabularies. Wider
horizons are evidenced by the trade in select materials, primarily obsidian, polished
stone axes and later occasionally metals, over substantial distances, and by the rising
settlement of medium to small islands. This last phenomenon, in effect a secondary
extension of the farming zone, was most significant in the island-studded sub-basins
of the Aegean, Adriatic and Tyrrhenian, where newly resident communities within
these seas hastened the articulation of multilateral maritime networks.
Once again, however, the Levant stands out for its exceptional dynamism. In fact,
by the time the Neolithic reached the Atlantic around 5500, the entire first cycle of
farming back in its hearth area, associated with sometimes enormous pre-pottery
communities, was already in abeyance, to be followed by a long phase of low-key
restructuring out of which emerged, by 4500, a second phase of complex Copper Age
societies. These are best known for their spectacular mastery of work in local and
exotic metals, the latter entailing long-range relations with Anatolia and Egypt. Yet
from a Mediterranean perspective they are just as remarkable for their sophisticated
agricultural strategies, which foreshadow widespread later practices, and whose
precocity owes much to a three-millennium head-start in experimentation, plus the
Levant’s location at the junction point of several continental zones. For example, the
first olive exploitation was a Levantine achievement (viticulture had multiple origins
in the Mediterranean and further east, but the Levant, again, lay near a major core
zone in the Caucasus and surrounding montane belt), while widespread animal-based
practices such as milking and traction were likewise integrated with more specific
innovations like the breeding of woolly sheep for textiles (probably another upland
initiative), and the earliest pack donkey, a north-east African beast in its wild state and
obtained via connections along the coast of Sinai. Meanwhile, floodwater-catching