The Nile Basin: Quaternary Geology, Geomorphology and Prehistoric Environments

Description

The Nile Basin contains a record of human activities spanning the last million years. However, the interactions between prehistoric humans and environmental changes in this area are complex and often poorly understood. This comprehensive book explains in clear, non-technical terms how prehistoric environments can be reconstructed, with examples drawn from every part of the Nile Basin. Adopting a source-to-sink approach, the book integrates events in the Nile headwaters with the record from marine sediment cores in the Nile Delta and offshore. It provides a detailed record of past environmental changes throughout the Nile Basin and concludes with a review of the causes and consequences of plant and animal domestication in this region and of the various prehistoric migrations out of Africa into Eurasia and beyond. A comprehensive overview, this book is ideal for researchers in geomorphology, climatology and archaeology.

Martin Williams is Adjunct Professor in Earth Sciences at the University of Adelaide, Australia. He has worked with archaeologists in the Sahara, Nile Valley and Ethiopia, and has written over two hundred research papers and a dozen books, including Climatic Change in Deserts (Cambridge, 2014), A Land Between Two Niles (with Donald Adamson, 1982) and The Sahara and the Nile (with Hugues Faure, 1980). He received the Farouk El Baz Award for Desert Research from the Geological Society of America in 2008.