Dry climatic events and cultural trajectories: Adjusting Middle Holocene pastoral economy of the Libyan Sahara.

Recent approaches to palaeoclimate studies reveal a greater emphasis on short, abrupt dry intervals, believed to have particularly influenced human activity and more generally the cultural dynamics in the area. If we consider these dynamics as expressions of human groups in relation to a changing landscape, and not merely as assemblages of lithics and ceramics, we probably have an adequate perspective. As a matter of fact, on a generation scale, the environment was probably more static than dynamic; but short, drastic events may have had particular relevance in shaping decision-making strategies among groups. This paper will consider short, or even abrupt, dry intervals which conditioned human dynamics in the Central Sahara, taken as examples of the interrelation of environmental changes and cultural adjustments in the past. The cases deal with mid-Holocene food-producing groups, whose economic basis relied on pastoral herding and intensive plant exploitation. The study area is the Acacus mountain range and its surroundings, an area already intensely studied in the past, and currently being investigated by the Italo-Libyan Joint Mission of the University of Rome, “La Sapienza”.