The Nile Basin: Quaternary Geology, Geomorphology and Prehistoric Environments

by Martin Williams

Overview

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 Δ 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781107179196
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	01/03/2019
Pages:	420
Product dimensions:	7.01(w) x 9.96(h) x 0.87(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Preface; Acknowledgments; 1. Introduction; 2. Evolution of the Nile Basin; 3. Climate and hydrology; 4. Geology and soils; 5. Vegetation, land use and human impact; 6. The Ethiopian Highlands; 7. The Ugandan Lake Plateau; 8. The Sudd swamps and the White Nile; 9. Lake Turkana and overflow into the Sobat; 10. The Khor Abu Habl Fan and Kordofan desert dunes; 11. The Gezira alluvial fan and Blue Nile palaeochannels; 12. The Atbara valley; 13. Jebel Marra volcano; 14. The desert Nile; 15. West of the Nile: the Western Desert of Egypt and the Eastern Sahara: part one; 16. West of the Nile: the Western Desert of Egypt and the Eastern Sahara: part two; 17. The Fayum; 18. The Red Sea Hills; 19. The Sinai desert; 20. The Nile Δ; 21. The Nile Cone; 22. Origins of plant and animal domestication in the Nile Basin; 23. Epilogue: 'out of Africa'; References; Index.