Since the first important review by G. Camps (Camps, Delibrias & Thommeret 1968) and even the most recent one by R. Vernet (2004), both concluding that more research is urgently needed, several interdisciplinary programmes of survey and excavation have taken place in the Sahara, but their number is still too low. As a result, it is almost impossible to have a good overview of a zone covering 9 million square kilometres, all the more so as several large areas (Southeast Libya, Northwest Mauritania, etc.) are still almost completely unexplored or not sufficiently known.

Besides, discussions have often been bogged down by ideological and methodological inertia, mainly because of ethnocentric perspectives or some assumptions that still persist long after they have been refuted. A good example is the alleged “Ibero-Maurusian culture”, so-called by P. Pallary (1899) because he saw it as a wide-ranging civilisation spreading out from Oran (Algeria) to Andalusia. This view is now abandoned, but the name is still in use, under the form Iberomaurusian (with no hyphen). Long disputes about the “Capsian mirage” have similarly obfuscated the visibility of this culture. Likewise, the notion of a “Neolithic” carelessly transposed into Saharan contexts made local processes difficult to understand when they were not identical to – and often not dependent on – Near Eastern or European evolutionary patterns. Moreover, the first radiocarbon dates provided in the 1950s and even the 1960s were not reliable, but a good number of them still burden the literature or are used for working out incongruous chronologies. Finally, obsolete frames of reference are still used to propose simplistic interpretative lenses, such as the one systematically making a chronological and cultural distinction between “Hunters” and “Herders” (Le Quellec 2008a).