Taming barbary sheep: wild animal management in the Early Holocene hunter-gatherers at Uan Afuda (Libyan Sahara).

Marginal and arid environments, particularly those of North Africa, represent stimulating places to analyse past human adaptive strategies. One of the problems mostly hotly debated is the emergence of domestication. The antiquity of domestic cattle in some sites, like at Uan Muhuggiag in the Tadrart Acacus has been often used to invoke a process of autonomous domestication in the Sahara, independent of the Near East. In this paper we wish to discuss the relationships between human groups and animal resources in the Tadrart Acacus mountain range during the Early Holocene, independently of the general problem of domestication (Gautier 1990; Smith 1992). We will deal with the identification of particular forms of wild animal management during the "pre-pastoral" period (i.e. 9,000- 7.500 BP years). One problem is the general poor quality of the archaeozoological record. Specific ways of studying the archaeological record, peculiar features of arid environments, different kinds of post-depositional processes are all factors which lead to the low number of finds, and in general the bad preservation of these remains in this region. Beyond the specific problems of these archaeological deposits, it must be rendered explicit as really the only archaeozoological approach is not sufficient to face totally the complex problematic of the animal arranagement, but it is essential to integrate multi-dimensional analysis.