Ricostruzione ambientale e climatica dei siti archeologici olocenici del Tadrart Acacus (Sahara Centrale, Libia) basata sui reperti botanici

Central Sahara rock shelters and caves offer the possibility to work on a fairly detailed archaeobotanical reconstruction, giving a coherent picture of plant cover during the early and middle Holocene and helping the investigation of past landscape evolution towards the present desert condition. This paper summarises palynological research carried out within a multidisciplinary archaeological research on the Wadi Teshuinat area (Tadrart Acacus Mts., in South-Western Fezzan, Libya). The sites were occupied by hunter-gatherer and pastoralist cultures. On-site pollen data, treated as a single ‘regional site’, showed that different pollen stratigraphies and flora characterised the different past phases. Plant macro-remains also helped to understand local plant exploitation and landscape evolution. Pollen spectra showed that some climate oscillations had occurred in the Wadi Teshuinat area in the early and middle Holocene: wet and cool (approx. 8800-8250 cal.BC), dry and warm (approx. 7920-7520 cal. BC), wet (approx. 7550-7200 cal.BC), dry (6340-6210 cal.BC - geoarchaeological evidence), wet and warm (approx. 6250-4300 cal.BC, including a wetter and warmer phase at approx. 5500-4600 cal.BC); dry and warm (4250-2900 cal.BC); drier and warm (2900-1600 cal.BC, up to the present). Since the early Holocene, both climatic and anthropic factors have played an important and strictly interconnected role in transforming the environment. Thus, while subsistence strategies were adjusting to climatic and environmental changes, the plant landscape was also being slowly and continuously shaped by humans.