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Anthropogenic and environmental processes present unique challenges for preserving cultural heritage in North Africa. Large parts of this region are characterised by unfavourable arid and semi-arid conditions and rapid changes to the landscapes caused by heightened regional development (e.g., urban expansion, road building, agricultural intensification, and socio-political conflicts). As a result, we are facing a fast-paced disappearance of heritage sites in regions that are still poorly understood. Following this, the utilisation of Earth observation data through aerial photographs and satellite imagery has emerged as an unmatched tool in the exploration of endangered archaeological heritage. Drawing on this context, this paper underscores the critical significance of incorporating digital research methods, such as remote sensing, GIS, or cartographic analysis, to ensure the evaluation and (digital) preservation of the historical sites along these vulnerable areas. Furthermore, our study seeks to provide new insights into data management and dissemination, fostering open research practices within North African archaeological research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores radio broadcasting and monitoring by and about Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) leader John Garang during Sudan's second civil war, focusing on the core period of Radio SPLA broadcasting (1984–91). Through oral history, memoirs, and international monitoring reports, the article analyzes radio conversations between Garang and his critics — northern Sudanese, southern Sudanese, and international — to argue that radio battles directly shaped the struggle for political authority between Garang and the Sudanese government, and within the SPLM/A elite. Radio allowed Garang to speak to a dispersed audience within and beyond Sudan, presenting an alternative history of Sudan, publicizing his vision of a New Sudan, and asserting his pseudo-sovereign control of SPLM/A-held territory. However, Radio SPLA did not exist in a vacuum; Garang's rivals responded on government and international radio to criticize his leadership in targeted, personal terms. Radio thus powerfully mediated between personal, national, and international politics during the SPLM/A's liberation struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines state-society encounters in imperial Ethiopia through histories of exploitation and compromise. Focusing on the western province of Qellem, the article investigates Ethiopia's engagement with local rights claims over time, illustrating how the state was imagined, negotiated, and partially legitimated. The inherent incoherence within imperial state structures is traced back to the survival of nodes of indigenous power within territories conquered in the late nineteenth century. Peasant representatives, local elites, and Amhara governors and soldier-colonists engaged with the state to turn it to their benefit, or limit its excesses. Episodes of rebellion, withdrawal, and court arbitration punctuated a cycle of negotiation within which the role of the intermediary was key. Qellem experienced a state-making exercise that was contemporaneous with, and comparable to, the formation of European colonial states elsewhere on the continent. As such, this article provides a radical challenge to dominant historiographical perspectives on imperial Ethiopia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New investigations of petrographic and geochemical characteristics of Mesozoic sandstones from the northwestern Gulf of Suez in Egypt have been undertaken, documenting dominance of quartzose sandstones containing on average ~ 5% of mostly sedimentary and subordinately metamorphic lithic fragments (siltstone, sandy siltstone, and, more rarely slate, metasiltstone, limestone, dolostone, quartz-muscovite schist, and gneiss). These sandstones are depleted in many chemical elements and display low Al2O3/SiO2 and K2O/Na2O ratios. Mineralogical and geochemical parameters point at extensive recycling from older (i.e., Paleozoic) siliciclastic strata. Relatively constant composition throughout the Mesozoic contrasts with successive palaeogeographic changes associated to the major events of rifting and dispersal, which may be explained by the widespread distribution of Paleozoic clastic wedges all across northern Gondwana. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The African Calendar and the Bibliography of Michał Kobusiewicz.

I met Michał for the first time in the spring of 1959 while recruiting young archaeologists to work on the excavation of the Final Palaeolithic and Mesolithic camps of Rydno Complex, a Stone Age red ochre quarry and socio-economic centre. A fresh MA in archaeology, I was then working as a field manager for Stefan Krukowski, an unorthodox prehistorian, directing work in the very significant Rydno Project in Central Poland. During the project, young Kobusiewicz turned out to be a competent, eager student and a good field companion. We spent the next field season together on a foot-survey along the Late Glacial left bank Vistula terrace between Włocławek and Płock in central Poland. We slept in farmers’ barns, cooked one-dish meals in a pot that we carried fastened to our backpacks, and duly recorded many, today classic, Mesolithic sandy sites. Since these early years of our acquaintance, our professional, as well as private lives, became closely intertwined. We worked jointly in many Combined Prehistoric Expedition (CPE) missions in Egypt and at several sites in his cherished ‘prehistoric Arcadia’, or the Wojnowo Region in Western Poland.

Ancient nomadic peoples in Northeast Africa, being in the shadow of urban regimes of Egypt, Kush, and Aksum as well as the Graeco-Roman and Arab worlds, have been generally relegated to the historiographical model of the frontier 'barbarian'. In this view, little political importance is attached to indigenous political organisation, with desert nomads being considered an amorphous mass of unsettled people beyond the frontiers of established states. However, in the Eastern Desert of Sudan and Egypt, a pastoralist nomadic people ancestrally related to the modern Beja dominated the deserts for millennia. Though generally considered as a group of politically divided tribes sharing only language and a pastoralist economy, ancient Beja society and its elites created complex political arrangements in their desert. When Egyptian, Greek, Coptic, and Arab sources are combined and analysed, it is evident that nomads formed a large confederate 'nomadic state' throughout late antiquity and the early medieval period — a vital cog in the political engine of Northeast Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Critically Endangered White-winged Flufftail Sarothrura ayresi is only known to breed in the high-altitude wetlands of Ethiopia and South Africa. Several studies have documented the physical properties of nests in the well-known Berga wetland, Ethiopia; however, behavioural accounts of birds at these nests are limited. Remote monitoring techniques have revolutionised the ability to detect and observe elusive species, such as wetland rallids. We discuss the challenges experienced during a pilot study to collect observations at nests of White-winged Flufftails on the breeding grounds in Ethiopia. Lessons learnt from placement of camera traps at nest sites and conservation implications for future monitoring are discussed and guidelines for camera trap deployment are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Caves are commonly used for the purposes of geological conservation and tourism, but such experience is very limited in desert areas of northeastern Africa. The Sannur Cave discovered near Beni Suef in Egypt a few decades ago has been investigated in order to judge about its importance as geological heritage. It is established that the study territory contains three principal elements that can be attributed to geological heritage. These are the Sannur Cave itself, two quarries of the so-called Egyptian alabaster (recrystallized Eocene limestones used for ornamental stones and sculptures), and the geological landscape in the vicinities of the cave with some outcrops of Cenozoic rocks representing various facies and bearing numerous fossils. Two dominant geological heritage types of the study territory are geomorphological and sedimentary types, which represent globally and nationally unique phenomena. The Sannur Cave and the relevant features can be used for the purposes of geological conservation, research, education, and tourism, which make it an important natural resource. Geopark creation can help in efficient exploitation of the latter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2005 Turkish foreign policy in Africa becoming more pragmatic. Turkey's achievement in northeast Africa, however, had pioneered by their predecessor, the Ottoman dated back to the 16th century. Therefore, the objective of this article is to identify the features of each phases and Turkey roles in the said region. This qualitative study is carried out through literature refers mostly on authority sources mainly from the Turkish government. The collected information analyzed to obtain similarities, make comparisons and produce interpretations on the factors that are driving the policy in every phases. Study found that Ottoman relation and Turkey's foreign policy in the northeast Africa had undergone three up and down phases. First phase involved the individuals' influences on the Ottoman foreign policies carried by the territory expansion and controlling the trade route. It develop into the semi-structured organization phase as the beginning focused on the power expansion and organized assimilation by the Khedive as well as the economic and cultural co-operation throughout the year of 1950-2000. On structured organizational phase, symbiosis merges between government agencies and non-government organization (NGO) likewise economic and humanitarian society shows the implication of the matured Turkish foreign policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report on reptilian specimens collected in southern Sudan (currently the Republic of South Sudan) in 1978 and stored at the Zoologisches Forschungsmuseum Alexander Koenig, Bonn. Six species (one lizard, Leptosiaphos kilimensis, and five snakes, Hapsidophrys lineatus, Thrasops jacksoni, Toxicodryas pulverulenta, Amblyodipsas unicolor, Atheris squamigera) are documented as new records for the fauna of South Sudan and are discussed in a biogeographical context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores colonial development policy on the margins of British East Africa. It argues that much like current development practice in the region, increased colonial interventionism in the years after 1940 was motivated by security interests as well as environmental and economic considerations. Rural interventions were used as a mechanism to ‘rein in’ what were perceived to be subversive populations, as well as contain potential security threats. The article therefore throws new light on the nature of colonial rural development, as well as the connections between past and present development practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing from both fictional and non-fictional sources, this article traces the way history was conceptualised in twentieth-century Ethiopia by secular educated elites, charting the changing power relations between Ethiopia's hegemonic historiographical paradigm and the alternative historical visions that challenged this ‘Great Tradition’ over the course of the century. While the Great Tradition extols Ethiopia's past and future glories, the counter-histories focused instead on the country's failure to develop and democratise. Against the interpretation that the counter-histories supplanted the Great Tradition in the late 1960s, the article examines them in terms of complementarity. The intellectual interventions of young student radicals in the late 1960s constitute a break, but not a drastic paradigm shift from the past. The Great Tradition had already been called into question by older generations of intellectuals, even if they proved unable or unwilling to translate their disillusionment into political action. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article chronicles the diasporic life of the Cyprus-born Ethiopian priest Yoḥannǝs (1509–65), who, after traveling far and wide across Europe and to Portuguese India, eventually settled in Rome and served the papacy for over two decades. Rare language skills and a cosmopolitan coming of age enabled his remarkable ecclesiastical career as an agent of the Counter-Reformation. Shortly before an untimely death, Yoḥannǝs became the second black bishop and the first black nuncio in the history of the Roman Church, rare appointments that would not be accessible to black Africans again until the 20th century. His unique experience represents a significant addition to the available historiography on blacks in early modern Europe and calls into question some commonly held assumptions in African diaspora studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the research on the issue in its initial phases, the behaviour and hunting strategies of MSA communities inhabiting the Nile Valley in the Late and Terminal Pleistocene have been fragmentarily recognised thus far. Osteological materials from the area of the Affad Basin in the Middle Nile Valley, recorded in archaeological contexts and dated to the sixteenth millennium BP using OSL methods, have significantly enhanced our knowledge in this regard. It is the first time that an opportunity has occurred to construct a reliable model of the environment exploitation and the behaviour of human groups producing lithic tools using Levallois methods in the Terminal Pleistocene. Archaeozoological analyses have allowed the identification of taxa, species and anatomical origin of remains and enabled the establishment of a database of osteometric measurements. The animals hunted in the Sudanese Nile Valley during the Terminal Pleistocene have been classified with a view to refer the data to the results of analogous studies on MSA in South Africa. The behaviour of the communities occupying the Affad Basin 15,000 years ago was connected to the environment of the tree-covered, swampy savannah and extensive backwaters. Medium-sized antelope (kobus) was hunted most often. People hunted also, albeit less frequently, for large ruminants (buffalo), guenons and large rodents. Remains of fish and mega-fauna (hippopotamus and elephant) have been found in isolated concentrations, away from the camp sites. Remains of molluscs or ostrich eggs have not been registered. The condition of the osteological materials, notably their anatomical distribution, is shown to have been largely affected by wetland environment, rich in iron and manganese. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

West African participation in the pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj) grew considerably throughout the first half of the twentieth century. This article examines the causes and consequences of failed British and Saudi efforts to channel, regulate, and control the trans-Sahelian flow of pilgrims and enforce a regime of mobility along the Sahel and across the Red Sea. Focusing specifically on Red Sea ‘illicit’ passages, the study recovers the rampant and often harrowing crossings of dozens of thousands of West African pilgrims from the Eritrean to the Arabian coasts. It examines multiple factors that drove the circumvention of channeling and control measures and inscribes the experiences of West African historical actors on multiple historiographic fields that are seldom organically tied to West Africa: Northeast African regional history, the colonial history of Italian Eritrea, and the Red Sea as a maritime space connecting Africa with Arabia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution presents the environmental changes that occurred over the last ten millennia in a vast region of North Africa, encompassing the Central Sahara, the Greater Nile Valley and the Horn of Africa. These areas are of particular significance in the continent because of the early socioeconomic transformations that occurred there. An up-to-date review of palaeoclimate research is proposed with the aim to highlight new theoretical approaches, analytical methods and innovative techniques. Results of recent research on high-resolution and well-dated palaeoenvironmental archives for proxy data have been used to understand the climatic variability at different scales of resolution. We trace the regional changes in Holocene palaeohydrology, mostly regulated by monsoonal precipitation, and their effects on the landscape, and highlight the occurrence of short-term climatic events, arid or humid that may have had disruptive consequences on human communities. The contribution also discusses the cultural dynamics that occurred in those regions because the latter were exploited by hunter/gatherer groups from the onset of the Holocene until historical times. A reconstruction of patterns of human adjustment to climatic variability is here presented, focusing on key processes such as the origin of food production, social complexity and power, and the rise and fall of complex polities and interregional networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fragmentary cranial bones of dinosaur origin have been recently recovered from the Kem Kem beds (Upper Cretaceous, Cenomanian) of Morocco. They include two incompletely preserved maxillary bones evidencing diagnostic features of abelisaurid theropods. These new finds provide further evidence of Abelisauridae in the Late Cretaceous of Morocco.

Recent literature has emphasised the political and economic opportunities afforded to peoples living in African borderlands by the existence of permeable inter-state boundaries. This article examines the history of the Darfur-Chad borderland under colonial rule and finds that serious risks existed for those attempting to circumvent state authority in order to take advantage of such opportunities. State-led attempts to control these borders, though always incomplete, were often characterised by considerable violence. The limits of state power did not therefore straightforwardly translate into an accommodation with border societies. That said, this was also a border zone characterised by complex interaction and negotiation between state and local forms of regulation, and by multiple forms of sovereignty. This led to the emergence of plural and hybrid forms of authority, now repeatedly observed in studies of contemporary African borderlands, but rarely fully historicised. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In their recent paper, Farouk and El-Sorogy (2015) present a reconstruction of the Danian–Selandian relative sea-level changes for the Western Desert of Egypt and an interpretation of eustatic versus tectonic controls on the latter. However, the relative sea-level changes should be distinguished from the shoreline shifts (also for the purposes of inter-regional comparisons). From three alternative global curves, two confirm the authors’ conclusions, although it is questionable whether these curves are suitable for the purposes of such an analysis. It cannot be excluded that the relative sea-level fall in the late Danian was caused by the same regional tectonic uplift that resulted in the hiatus at the Danian/Selandian boundary. More research (including quantitative palaeobathymetric modelling) is necessary to understand the relative importance of the eustatic and tectonic controls on the sea-level changes established in the Western Desert of Egypt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The principal paleogeographic characteristics of North and Central Africa during the Paleozoic were the permanency of large exposed lands over central Africa, surrounded by northerly and northwesterly dipping pediplanes episodically flooded by epicontinental seas related to the Paleotethys Ocean. The intra-continental Congo–Zaire Basin was also a long-lived feature, as well as the Somali Basin from Late Carboniferous times, in conjunction with the development of the Karoo basins of southern Africa. This configuration, in combination with eustatic sea-level fluctuations, had a strong influence on facies distributions. Significant transgressions occurred during the Early Cambrian, Tremadocian, Llandovery, Middle to Late Devonian, Early Carboniferous, and Moscovian. The Paleozoic tectonic history shows an alternation of long periods of predominantly gentle basin subsidence and short periods of gentle folding and occasionally basin inversion. Some local rift basins developed episodically, located mainly along the northern African–Arabian plate margin and near the West African Craton/Pan-African Belt suture. Several arches or spurs, mainly N–S to NE–SW trending and inherited from late Pan-African fault swarms, played an important role. The Nubia Province was the site of numerous alkaline anorogenic intrusions, starting in Ordovician times, and subsequently formed a large swell. Paleozoic compressional events occurred in the latest Early Cambrian (“Iskelian”), Medial Ordovician to earliest Silurian (“pre-Caradoc” and “Taconian”), the end Silurian (“Early Acadian” or “Ardennian”), mid-Devonian (“Mid-Acadian”), the end Devonian (“Late Acadian” or “Bretonnian”), the earliest Serpukhovian (“Sudetic”), and the latest Carboniferous–earliest Permian (“Alleghanian” or “Asturian”). The strongest deformations, including folding, thrusting, and active strike-slip faulting, were registered in Northwestern Africa during the last stage of the Pan-African Belt development around the West African Craton (end Early Cambrian) and during the polyphased Hercynian–Variscan Orogeny that extended the final closure of the Paleotethys Ocean and resulted in the formation of the Maghrebian and Mauritanides belts. Only gentle deformation affected central and northeastern African during the Paleozoic, the latter remaining a passive margin of the Paleotethys Ocean up to the Early Permian when the development of the Neotethys initiated along the Eastern Mediterranean Basins. The Mesozoic–Cenozoic sedimentary sequence similarly consists of a succession of eustatically and tectonically controlled depositional cycles. Through time, progressive southwards shift of the basin margins occurred, related to the opening of the Neotethys Ocean and to the transgressions resulting from warming of the global climate and associated rise of the global sea level. The Guinean–Nigerian Shield, the Hoggar, Tibesti–Central Cyrenaica, Nubia, western Saudi Arabia, Central African Republic, and other long-lived arches delimited the principal basins. The main tectonic events were the polyphased extension, inversion, and folding of the northern African–Arabian shelf margin resulting in the development of the Alpine Maghrebian and Syrian Arc belts, rifting and drifting along the Central Atlantic, Somali Basins, and Gulf of Aden–Red Sea domains, inversion of the Murzuq–Djado Basin, and rifting and partial inversion along the Central African Rift System. Two major compressional events occurred in the Late Santonian and early Late Eocene. The former entailed folding and strike-slip faulting along the northeastern African–northern Arabian margin (Syrian Arc) and the Central African Fold Belt System (from Benue to Ogaden), and thrusting in Oman. The latter (“Pyrenean-Atlasic”) resulted in folding, thrusting, and local metamorphism of the northern African–Arabian plate margin, and rejuvenation of intra-plate fault zones. Minor or more localized compressional deformations took place in the end Cretaceous, the Burdigalian, the Tortonian and Early Quaternary. Recent tectonic activity is mainly concentrated along the Maghrebian Alpine Belt, the offshore Nile Delta, the Red Sea–East African Rifts Province, the Aqaba–Dead Sea–Bekaa sinistral strike-slip fault zone, and some major intra-plate fault zones including the Guinean–Nubian, Aswa, and central Sinai lineaments. Large, long-lived magmatic provinces developed in the Egypt–Sudan confines (Nubia), in the Hoggar–Air massifs, along the Cameroon Line and Nigerian Jos Plateau, and along the Levant margin, resulting in uplifts that influenced the paleogeography. Extensive tholeiitic basaltic magmatism at ∼200Ma preceded continental break-up in the Central Atlantic domain, while extensive alkaline to transitional basaltic magmatism accompanied the Oligocene to Recent rifting along the Red Sea–Gulf of Aden–East African rift province. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]