Abstract

The later prehistory of Mediterranean Africa west of Egypt has long been a blind-spot both in Mediterranean and much of African archaeology. This is particularly true of the last few millennia BCE , prior to Phoenician and Greek activity, when it appears at odds with the rich evidence for dramatic social change elsewhere in the Copper to Bronze Age Mediterranean, as well as along the Nile. Recent analyses, moreover, have highlighted the variability and potential dynamism of this region’s social trajectories over this same timespan. Particularly promising is the northwestern Maghreb, a fully Mediterranean environment closely comparable to Iberia and other regions to the north of the sea. New fieldwork by a collaborative British-Italian-Moroccan team at the Moroccan site of Oued Beht has now identified evidence for a large scale agriculturally-based society that flourished between ca. 3400 and 2900 BC (and probably a couple of centuries on either side), with indications of close contacts both with southern Iberia and the Sahara. Given the early stage of investigation, many aspects of the site’s interpretation remain provisional and subject to ongoing fieldwork and analysis, but already the outline of a new set of approaches to Maghrebian later prehistory can be advocated.

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