Since 2002, the University of East Anglia’s Western Sahara Project has undertaken a series of field seasons in the POLISARIO-controlled areas or ‘Free Zone’ of Western Sahara (Fig. 11.1). This work has involved intensive survey and excavation in a 3 km by 4 km area north of the settlement of Tifariti, known as the TF1 study area (Fig. 11.2), and extensive survey throughout the Northern and Southern Sectors of the Free Zone. Fieldwork has focused on the recording of funerary monuments and other stone-built features, rock art, surface scatters of archaeological materials and palaeo-environmental indicators. Dating has been carried out on human remains from two burials in the TF1 study area and on charcoal from test excavations of surface scatters of chipped stone and pottery.In addition, a number of indicators of past humid conditions from throughout the Free Zone have been dated and are awaiting publication.

The expansion of languages such as Hassaniya and Tuareg are demonstrably recent and a prior history is there to be uncovered.

The Lake Chad Basin constitutes an important crossroads in Africa, in the middle of the sweep of savanna that stretches from the Atlantic to the Nile and articulating the Central Sahara with lands to the south. This positioning implicated the region in human responses to Mid-Late Holocene environmental changes, especially those involving decreases in rainfall regimes and the disappearance of Lake Mega-Chad. Archaeological and other evidence indicates that these processes involved periodic population exchanges and cultural interchanges between the southern Sahara and the Lake Chad Basin. The period from c.1800 BC onward saw a development ofagro-pastoral systems and an expansion of permanent settlements south of Lake Chad, first on Gajiganna Culture sites and then more widely.

The Middle Nile (from Aswan in Egypt to Khartoum in Sudan, Fig. 6.1) is quite exceptional in Sub-Saharan Africa. It is a region where, from the beginning, archaeological frameworks have been constructed largely on the basis of cemetery excavations. This has, of course, much to do with regionally specific research histories and emergent archaeological practices associated with them. The traditions of materially rich mortuary cultures encountered in the Middle Nile, dating back to the early Neolithic period (here the sixth millennium BC), has continued to attract significant archaeological attention. Numerous, often large, cemeteries are still routinely being explored within the context of both research and rescue archaeology. Their material abundance continues to fascinate. The first extensive archaeological survey of Nubia, completed in 1911, excavated more than 8,200 graves in 151 cemeteries within a ‘survey’ area limited to the riverine oasis and covering an area of less than 250 km2.

The Garamantes were the earliest urbanised population in the Central Sahara, and their socio-political and economic histories have been the subject of extensive study.However, little is known about their biological origins. Building on the results obtained in the Desert Migrations Project, the biocultural theme within the Trans-SAHARA Project has sought to answer two main questions relating to human migration in the Central Sahara. First, it aimed to determine what (if any) biological and cultural links can be established between the historical kingdom of the Garamantes and the preceding late Neolithic (Pastoral) and contemporary peoples in the surrounding Saharan, Sahelian, Nilotic and Mediterranean regions. Second, the project aimed to investigate aspects of the diet and individual mobility of the people who were buried in the Garamantian cemeteries of the Wadi al-Ajal, in direct comparison with results from the analysis of people from the surrounding regions.

Situated in the hinterland of the eastern Niger Bend in north-east Burkina Faso (Fig. 12.1), in the so-called Gourma area (that is, the bush-land on the right bank of the Niger River), the archaeological site of Kissi consists of an extensive cluster of adjacent settlement areas, including several burial grounds (Fig. 12.2). Its occupation during almost the whole Iron Age (c.third century BC to twelfth century AD) provides the opportunity to follow certain developments that local society underwent over more than a millennium. Spreading over an area of more than 300 hectares, the archaeological site lies on the northern shore of the Mare de Kissi (see Fig. 12.2), a small rainwater-fed lake, similar to – though smaller than – several other lakes in this region (that is, Mare d’Oursi c.35 km to the west, Mare de Darkoy c.6 km to the north, or Mare de Markoye c.15 km to the east, to name but the largest).

The Middle Nile (from Aswan in Egypt to Khartoum in Sudan, Fig. 6.1) is quite exceptional in Sub-Saharan Africa. It is a region where, from the beginning, archaeological frameworks have been constructed largely on the basis of cemetery excavations. This has, of course, much to do with regionally specific research histories and emergent archaeological practices associated with them. The traditions of materially rich mortuary cultures encountered in the Middle Nile, dating back to the early Neolithic period (here the sixth millennium BC), has continued to attract significant archaeological attention. Numerous, often large, cemeteries are still routinely being explored within the context of both research and rescue archaeology. Their material abundance continues to fascinate. The first extensive archaeological survey of Nubia, completed in 1911, excavated more than 8,200 graves in 151 cemeteries within a ‘survey’ area limited to the riverine oasis and covering an area of less than 250 km2.

Over the period since the early Holocene, peoples belonging to either of two cultural and linguistic complexes have come to prevail across most of the vast Sahara region, from the Mediterranean in the north to the Sahel zone in the south. Through the southern Sahara, from the areas just north of the great bend of the Niger River at the west to the Nile River in the east, these populations most often spoke languages of the Nilo-Saharan language family. In North Africa, the northern half of the Sahara, and in the lands east of the Nile, societies speaking diverse languages of the Afroasiatic language family usually predominated.

The primary focus here will be on what linguistic evidence can tell about the history of peoples of the Berber branch of Afroasiatic, and thus on historical developments in North Africa and the northern, central and Western Sahara, particularly in the period from around 2000 BC down to Late Antiquity.

This chapter is written in response to that of Christopher Ehret in this volume, aiming to show how the linguistic ‘family tree’ he sketches for the Tamazight, or Berber, language family might relate to the history of Amazigh peoples. This is, of course, a tall order. Any more than an impressionistic correlation between historical linguistics and archaeological evidence is going to fall straight into a series of perfectly well-known pitfalls: that language change does not necessarily imply massive invasions has been constantly repeated, not least by Colin Renfrew, while the various processes by which new languages or their variants may be diffused have been thoroughly theorised, a subset of the diffusion versus acculturation debate.