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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Fish, Pots and Grain: Early and Mid-Holocene Adaptations in the Central Sudan
Author:Haaland, RandiISNI
Year:1992
Periodical:African Archaeological Review
Volume:10
Pages:43-64
Language:English
Geographic term:Sudan
Subjects:agricultural history
prehistory
Anthropology and Archaeology
External link:https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01117696
Abstract:Cultural development in the middle Nile Valley from 10,000 to 2000 bp was characterized by significant subsistence changes - from hunting/gathering and simple aquatic resource exploitation to cultivation of domestic sorghum. Research in the Atbara and Khartoum regions (Central Sudan) enables us to identify distinct technological phases relating to resource diversification as well as specialization. Pottery was an important technological innovation which had far-reaching consequences for the development of a more diversified use of aquatic and cereal resources. A basic distinction is made between cultivation and domestication as two separate but interdependent processes - the first a socioeconomic process relating to peoples' activities, the second a biological process relating to morphological changes in plants. Cultivation is considered to be evolutionarily prior to domestication and to have constituted the selection pressures which led to the emergence of domesticated plants. Cultivation of sorghum was practised from the 6th millennium bp but domesticated sorghum emerged only around 2000 bp. Specialized pastoralism and the use of secondary products like milk and blood appear to have become important in the late 6th millennium bp. An attempt is made to connect the development of technological traditions with that of Nilo-Saharan and Cushitic languages. Bibliogr., sum. in English and French.
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