Morocco - El Harhoura-Témara

North Africa provides an exceptional framework for studying the emergence and development of Homo sapiens, due to the quality and diversity of sedimentary records and the numerous traces left by populations over the millennia. Thus, at the centre of the debate on origins, where the study of palaeoclimate change meets the study of human cultures and populations, the prehistoric sites of North Africa are contributing significantly to our knowledge of human prehistory in Africa. In the 1970s, a series of discoveries of Palaeolithic human remains at Dar es Soltane 2, El Harhoura 1 and Les Contrebandiers led to the Rabat/Témara region being established as an archaeological benchmark. From the 1990s, research conducted in this region significantly added to available data. Tying in with this research, further excavations begun in 2001 in the El Harhoura 2 and El Mnasra cave sites by the El Harhoura-Témara archaeological expedition helped to provide further information on the regional palaeoenvironmental framework and to document prehistoric human behaviour in a new stratigraphic context. Findings from this work and ongoing research, when considered alongside the history of research in Morocco over the last 130 years or so, are helping us to address topical issues relating to Palaeolithic and Neolithic settlement in North Africa based on recent and/or previously unpublished data.

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