Remarks on the Prehistoric Geography and Underground Waters of Kharga Oasis

CONCENTRATED research, confined to a relatively restricted region during two successive winter seasons, by such keen and competent students of archaeology and geology as Miss Caton-Thompson and Miss Gardner, has yielded an invaluable mass of data from which it is possible to form, with at least some measure of assurance, general conceptions of the physiographical and climatic conditions and changes during the different stages of the human occupation of the Oasis of Kharga and adjoining high plateaux, and of the period immediately preceding. Details of the work accom? plished and of the deductions drawn therefrom by these authors have been published in various scientific journals, the most comprehensive account being that in the Geographical Journal for November 1932.1 As the researches already carried out are to be extended this winter into southern Kharga, I venture to make a few remarks and offer one or two criticisms regarding the conclusions so far published, in the hope that they will be thought to be of sufficient interest to be taken into consideration before Miss Caton-Thompson and Miss Gardner bring their work in the oasis to a termination. My remarks are, I admit, based on a study of the geology and water-supply of the district made twenty-five years ago, and I can make no pretensions to special archaeo? logical knowledge. Tufa Deposits.?Knowledge of the travertines of the region has been very greatly extended. The type, in which, except for reed-impressions, neither leaves, shells, nor human tools have been found, is considered by Miss Caton-Thompson and Miss Gardner as undoubtedly the oldest?an assumption apparently based largely, if not entirely, on physiographical features?the Wadi or lake tufas being recognized by their associated implements as having been formed at three different periods of the Palaeolithic. These latter tufas contain land and freshwater gastropods as well as leaves and reeds, and pre? sumably it was from them that Zittel collected specimens of Quercus ilex and Arundo nearly sixty years ago. It is now suggested that the Plateau type of tufa is of the same age as the travertine and associated beds which were laid down in the Nile Valley and now occupy large areas in the bounding cliffs ofthe valley in Upper Egypt. These latter, mapped by the Geological Survey long ago but never adequately described, have recently been re-examined by Dr. K. S. Sandford,2 who regards them as having been laid down in a Pliocene gulf ofthe Mediterranean, a conclusion differing little from that generally held twenty-five years previously. Sandford's finding is, it should be noted, based entirely on the relations of these deposits to the later Pleistocene gravels con? taining Mousterian and pre-Mousterian flint implements, and apparently is

Archaeology · Geography · Physical geography · Prehistory · Ancient Egypt and Archaeology · Archaeological Research and Protection · Archaeology and Historical Studies

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