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A Late Paleolithic Kill-Butchery-Camp in Upper Egypt by Fred Wendorf, Romuald Schild, Polydora Baker, Achilles Gautier, Laura Longo and Amal Mohamed, Warsaw 1997 INTRODUCTION by Fred Wendorf and Romuald Schild GEOMORPHOLOGY, STRATIGRAPHY, CHRONOLOGY AND PALEOENVIRONMENT by Romuald Schild and Fred Wendorf. LITHIC ARTIFACTS by Fred Wendorf and Romuald Schild FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS by Laura Longo SITE E71K12 AND THE LATE PALEOLITHIC ANNUAL ROUND ALONG THE NILE IN UPPER EGYPT by Poli/dora Baker and Achilles Gautier GENERAL CONCLUSIONS by Fred Wendorf and Romuald Schild BIBLIOGRAPHY This is a report on a limited archaeological salvage project at an important Late Paleolithic site located on the west bank of the Nile in Upper Egypt (Figure 1). The site is now destroyed by a reclamation project. The results of this salvage project are not entirely satisfactory, because before we began these studies most of the site had already been destroyed when the area was leveled and cultivated during the previous year. We were late in our efforts because we failed to appreciate the energy of Egyptian farmers when offered the opportunity to own new farmland, and because we failed to understand the extent the threat the then newly expanded reclamation program posed to prehistoric sites in the Nile Valley. In the winter of 1967 the Combined Prehistoric Expedition conducted an archaeological survey of the area along the west bank of the Nile from Aswan north to Armant, just south of Luxor, and it was at that time that Site E71K12 was found. When that survey was made very little was known about the Paleolithic occupation in this part of the Nile Valley, and it was anticipated that sites would be located which would justify a major study of the Late Paleolithic in this area. It was our assumption that a comparison with materials of the same age from farther south in the Aswan Reservoir, where the group had worked previously, would be of considerable interest (Wendorf 1968). Our assumption proved to be correct; numerous Late Paleolithic sites were found in several localities, and one of the richest of those areas was centered about 10 km north of the modern city of Esna, where there is a remnant of Late Pleistocene silts and sands standing from 5 to 6 m above the modern floodplain. The area was already being reclaimed for agriculture when the survey party arrived, the ditches for water had been dug and most of the silt areas had already been prepared for cultivation. Many of the archaeological sites, however, were located among fossil dunes that were excluded from reclamation; these dunes were thought to be too sandy for farming (Wendorf and Schild 1976: 43-91). Among the localities recorded during this survey was a group of four sites partially embedded in sands and silts of an extensive area of fossil dunes surrounded on two sides by already leveled fields of reclaimed silts, and on the other sides by a major canal and a drainage ditch, known as Wadi Number 6. Surface collections were taken from all four of the sites in this dune area. They represented three different Late Paleolithic industries, with occupations that we now know date between 19,000 and 12,500 bp (Wendorf and Schild 1976: 59-75). The data from two of the oldest sites became the major basis for a Ph.D. dissertation (Phillips 1973). One of these sites was E71K12, the locality discussed in this paper. The 1967 map of K12 showed that most of the artifacts occurred in an oval area about 65 m long and 60 m wide. For sampling purposes, surface collections were taken from five 10 x 10 m squares placed in the areas of greatest artifact densities around a low swale in the dune. In addition, at the south edge of the collected area a 2.5 x 2.5 m stratigraphic pit was dug to a depth of 2 m. Lithic artifacts and a few scraps of bone and a hartebeest (Alcelapus buselaphus) mandible were recovered from the upper 1.3 m of this pit. The 1967 collection from Site K12 totals 32,234 artifacts, including 29,186 pieces of debitage, 905 cores, and 2,143 retouched tools. Phillips used the Tixier (1963) type-list to classify his artifacts and documented close similarities between the... Spelling mistakes may occur (especially in multilanguage book contents) in the above fragment of text due to OCR program
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