Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2025

This canvas has never been blank: desertscape as a palimpsest (IVth mill. BCE – XXth c. CE)

Résumé

The Eastern Desert underwent major environmental changes during the Holocene. With the end of the African humid period during the mid-Holocene (8,2 - 4,2 ky), it dried out considerably, gradually becoming more and more like the desert we know today. While the origin of its formation is climatic, the evolution of its landscapes and socio-ecosystems owes much to human activities and occupation. This human presence is now quite well documented for the most important peaks in desert occupation, mainly linked to the exploitation of the desert's resources by political and economic powers based in the Nile Valley, or to its place in the trade and expedition roads to the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Horn of Africa. These different powers have marked the desert with signs of their presence, their networks, and their appropriation of places, all of which have accumulated, replaced, or cancelled each other out along time. But even in the earliest periods, the canvas has never been blank, because pre-desert occupation left some inheritances and because multi-resource nomadism, which is still insufficiently documented, resulted in other forms of appropriation of the desert areas. This second point is still too often neglected, as the nomads, who were present throughout the period studied, left few traces and the sedentary people did not always account for their interactions with these populations. The paper begins with a brief review of the Holocene climatic history of the Eastern Sahara, followed by a theoretical reflection on the different forms of territorialization and place appropriation that exist among nomadic and sedentary populations. Following these initial overviews, it presents case studies and reflections on the successive and/or simultaneous appropriations, transformations, and reuses of some of the watering places, roads, quarries, harbors, and mines of the Eastern Desert from the end of prehistory to the beginning of the 20th century AD.

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Dates et versions

halshs-05349137 , version 1 (05-11-2025)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : halshs-05349137 , version 1

Citer

Maël Crépy. This canvas has never been blank: desertscape as a palimpsest (IVth mill. BCE – XXth c. CE). Cristina Alù. Place-making in the desertscape: the socialisation of the Egyptian-Sudanese Eastern Desert landscape in the longue durée, Brepols: Warsaw Studies in Archaeology, In press. ⟨halshs-05349137⟩
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