The exploitation of wild plants in Neolithic North Africa. Use-wear and residue analysis on non-knapped stone tools from the Haua Fteah cave, Cyrenaica, Libya

摘要

The North African region offers up essential data for the study of the origins of the earliest forms of plant exploitation. Data available from several Saharan and coastal areas in the region have revealed that the arrival of domestic wheat and barley from the Levant during the Mid Holocene did not replace the exploitation of autochthonous wild plants, especially grasses. The Neolithic layers of the Haua Fteah cave, in Cyrenaica (Northern Libya), have so far produced archaeobotanical assemblages exclusively made up of wild species. This paper investigates production and use of non-knapped stone tools, mainly grinding stones, from the Holocene sequence of the Haua Fteah Cave. The presence of grinding stones may indicate a certain level of behavioural change and the adoption of new economic strategies, relying more strongly on plant exploitation. This assumption has been tested using an integrated approach of use-wear and residue analysis. These methods allowed us to obtain significant new information as to how tools were originally used.