Sahara | Ecology of the past

Mapping Ancient Africa: New publications (2)

September 3, 2026
WDG

Post holiday, and pre-teaching, I was searching around for recent studies on the environmental history of Africa and came across the following which hopefully are also of interest to Mapping Ancient Africa enthusiasts. If you have a paper that would be nice to highlight here, please get in contact and I will be happy to include it.

Bengo, M. D., Gomat, H.-Y., Bita, A. M., Ifo, S. A., Maley, J., & Giresse, P. (2026). High-resolution study of the Late Holocene from pollen of a marine core in the Gulf of Guinea (Cameroon): Paleoenvironmental and ecological dynamics in Central Africa during the last 2,500 years. Open Journal of Forestry, 16(01), 83–105. https://doi.org/10.4236/ojf.2026.161006
Effiom, A. C., Neumann, F. H., Scott, L., & Bamford, M. K. (2025). Morphology and ecological significance of Holocene palynomorphs from the Indian Ocean Coastal Belt Biome of South Africa. Palynology, 49(3), 2428382. https://doi.org/10.1080/01916122.2024.2428382
Garbe, P., Behl, M., Es-Senussi, A., Lange-Athinodorou, E., & Meister, J. (2026). Holocene vegetation dynamics and agricultural development at ancient Bubastis (Egypt): Insights from phytolith analysis. Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, 5, 1778152. https://doi.org/10.3389/fearc.2026.1778152
García-Morato, S., Sánchez-Goñi, M. F., Urrego, D. H., & d’Errico, F. (2026). Climatic variability, vegetation dynamics, and cultural innovation in Southern Africa during the Middle Stone Age. Communications Earth & Environment, 7(1), 75. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-025-03051-0
Gunnell, Y., Mietton, M., Defive, E., Andriamitia, J., Montade, V., Jouannic, G., Voldoire, O., Ramanantsoa, A., Blondeau, S., Nicoud, G., & Rasoanimanana, R. R. (2026). Peat deposits as records of Quaternary tectonics and landscape dynamics in the semi-volcanic highlands of Madagascar. CATENA, 273, 110414. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.catena.2026.110414
Sylvestre, F., Melles, M., Wennrich, V., Dinies, M., Chalié, F., Swingedouw, D., Dallmeyer, A., Shi, X., Claussen, M., Jaeschke, A., Cocquyt, C., Karls, J., Kuper, J., Mallaye, B., Mazur, J.-C., Paillès, C., Rirongarti, R., Rethemeyer, J., Ritter-Prinz, B., … Kröpelin, S. (2026). Decadal-scale droughts disrupted the African Humid Period in the Sahara. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10336-7

Also, new volume of Palaeoecology of Africa coming soon, check out the contents list:

Runge, J. (ed.) Environmental History and Climate Dynamics in Tropical Africa: Landscapes, Humans and Change ISBN 9781041215400

Climate frameworks for the Middle Stone Age and Later Stone Age in Northwest Africa

December 15, 2024
WDG

Mapping Ancient Africa Quaternary International special issue article #4

#openaccess

Boisard, S., Wren, C.D., Timbrell, L. & Burke, A. (2025) Climate frameworks for the Middle Stone Age and Later Stone Age in Northwest Africa. Quaternary International 716, 109593. DOI: 10.1016/j.quaint.2024.109593

To find the complete list of articles in the Mapping Ancient Africa special issue of Quaternary International click here.

PoA 35: Research Articles

December 15, 2021
WDG

The second in my series highlighting papers in the recent volume of Palaeoecology of Africa (published entirely open access online) focuses on the research articles. The research articles make up the ‘guts’ of the volume, comprising 10 of the 24 papers. Three of these are from western Africa (Dinies et al.; Gosling et al.; Lemonnier & Lézine), two from eastern Africa (Githumbi et al.; Kinyanjui et al.), two from central Africa (Richards; Gaillard et al.), and three from southern Africa (Chevalier et al.; Hill & Finch, Hill et al.). These research articles present new data and key insights into past environmental change in Africa, which fall into two broad categories, providing information on: (i) how we can extract information from pollen data sets, and (ii) the processes operating to drive vegetation.

Scientific Methods in Archaeology

November 21, 2018
WDG

Over the last two weeks I have been giving my lectures at the VU Amsterdam “Scientific Methods in Archaeology” bachelor program. In my lectures we think about how to detect past environmental change with particular reference to tracking past human activities. As part of our exploration of past human-environment-climate interactions each student is asked to choose a scientific article, summerise it, and we then discuss it in class. The three papers sected this year covered the Neolithic of the Netherlands (Weijdema et al., 2011), a overview of Mediterranean and north African cultural adaptations to drough events during the Holocene (Mercuri et al., 2011), and an exploration of the role of humans in mega-faunal extinctions in South America (Villavicencio et al., 2015). All papers provided interesting points of discussion and an opportunity to think about different aspects of how we investigate past environmental and societal change.

Read the full student summaries below.