A groundbreaking discovery in Oued Bet, Morocco, has revealed the earliest known agricultural society in northwestern Africa, changing our understanding of the region’s role in Mediterranean prehistory. The findings highlight the importance of the Maghreb in the emergence of complex societies in the late Neolithic. Archaeological fieldwork in Morocco has revealed the earliest known agricultural society from a previously little-understood prehistoric period in northwestern Africa.

This published study Ancient AgeIt demonstrates for the first time the importance of the Maghreb (northwestern Africa) in the emergence of complex societies in the wider Mediterranean. With its Mediterranean setting, bordering the Sahara Desert and the shortest sea passage between Africa and Europe, the Maghreb is ideally situated as a centre of major cultural events and intercontinental connections in the past.

Although the region’s importance in the Paleolithic, Iron Age and Islamic periods is well known, the years 4000 and 1000 BC are a period of dynamic change in much of the Mediterranean.

Joint archaeological fieldwork

To address this issue, Youssef Bockbot (INSAP), Cyprian Broadbank (University of Cambridge) and Giulio Lucarini (CNR-ISPC and ISMEO) conducted a joint multidisciplinary archaeological fieldwork in Oued Bet, Morocco.

Professor Broodbank says: “For over three decades I have been convinced that Mediterranean archaeology has lost something fundamental in later prehistoric North Africa. Now we finally know this to be true and can begin to think in new ways, recognising the dynamic contribution of Africans to the emergence and interaction of early Mediterranean societies.”

As the authors put it: ‘For over a century, the last great unknown in the later prehistory of the Mediterranean was the role played by societies in Africa, on the southern shore of the Mediterranean, west of Egypt. Our findings suggest that this gap was not due to a lack of intense prehistoric activity, but rather to a relative lack of research and publication. Wade Becht now confirms the central role of the Maghreb in the emergence of both Mediterranean and broader African society.’

A large agricultural complex

These results suggest that the site was the largest agricultural complex of its time in Africa outside the Nile region. All evidence points to a farming settlement of similar size to Early Bronze Age Troy. The team discovered unprecedented remains of domesticated plants and animals, as well as pottery and stone dating back to the Late Neolithic period. The excavations also revealed extensive evidence of deep storage pits.

It is notable that modern sites with similar pits have been found across the Strait of Gibraltar in Iberia, where finds of ivory and ostrich eggs have long suggested African connections, suggesting that the Maghreb played an important role in the wider development of the western Mediterranean in the 4th millennium BC.

Oued Bet and the northwestern Maghreb were clearly integral parts of the wider Mediterranean region, and these discoveries therefore significantly change our understanding of the later prehistory of the Mediterranean and Africa.

According to the authors of the article about antiquity : “It is important to see Oued Beht in a broader context of co-evolving and unifying peoples on both sides of the Mediterranean-Atlantic divide in the fourth and third millennia BC, and the possibility of movement in both directions – to recognize it as a distinctively African community that made significant contributions to the formation of this social world.”