10 - May -2010

Boustead Hugh,  1971. The Wind of Morning. An Autobiography. A Craven Street Books, 240.

"In the spring of '932 Major (now Brigadier) Bagnold, who won such fame with his Long Range Desert Group, had asked Newbold, an ardent archaeologist, to accompany him on the longest of his journeys, It was planned as a geological and archaeological expedition and survey of the Libyan Desert, Jebel Owenat and the outskirts of the Tebesti and Enneddi Mountains, thence south-east to the Wadi Hawa and on to El Fasher in the Sudano Newbold was unable to take part in this expedition, though he had done two previous explorations in the Libyan Desert with Shaw, the author of The Long Range Desert Group and later curator of the Jerusalem Museum, He asked me if I would take his place if Bagnold was agreeable, and recommended me to Bagnold as a member. This offered a singular opportunity of seeing this vast tract of country in company with interesting and cheerful companions. I jumped at it. "

Boustead became involved in the exploration of the Libyan Desert by pure chance. An extraordinary man with an extremely adventurous life at the end of the Old British Empire.

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26 - January -2010

William Andrefsky, 1998. Lithics: macroscopic approaches to analysis. Cambridge University Press, 258

"The serious handbook every student should read."

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25 - January -2010

John Charles Whittaker, 1994. Flintknapping: making and understanding stone tools. University of Texas Press, 341

" By reading this book I was delighted and enlightened at the same time."

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12 - December -2009

Barham L. and Mitchell P., 2008. The first Africans, African Archeology from the earliest toolmakers to most recent foragers. New York: Cambridge University Press

"Humans have inhabited Africa longer than anywhere else on Earth. Their history there reaches the oldest known stone tools to the point, 6 million to 7 million years ago, when the evolutionary lineage that ultimately produced Homo sapiens finally diverged from that leading to other hominids."

This very important textbooks deals in chapter 8 to 9 with recolonization by humans of the Sahara during the early and mid-Holocene. Everybody interested with the events that followed the "Big Dry" should read this book. Fundamental.

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08 - October - 2009

David Wengrow,  2006. The Archaeology of Early Egypt Social Transformations in North-East Africa, c. 10,000 to 2,650 BC Series: Cambridge World Archaeology University College London.

At the time the pastoral people inhabiting the Uweinat were painting their thousands cows what was happening along the Nile Valley? I posed this question to myself and found in this book the answers. Recommended.

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10 - July - 2009

Smith, Andrew B., 2005. African Herders: Emergence of pastoral tradition. eds. by Joseph O. Vogel, Walnut Creek (CA): AltaMira Press.

This book is the synthesis about African cattle pastoralism I was desperately in need when in 2005 I started to wonder at the Uweinat culture that expressed its obsession with cattle by painting every suitable rock surface in the Libyan Desert. Very informative and well written. Highly Recommended.

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07 - January - 2009

Frison G., 2004. Survival by Hunting: Prehistoric Human Predators and Animal Prey. Berkeley, University of California Press, 266.

Following the discovery by Berger of a gigantic stone lines system in the Western Desert near Regenfeld, game drives became for me the 2009 hot topic. I realized that a lot of scientific literature about game drives was produced by the Northern American archaeologists. I started to fill my lacunae about man as a prehistoric predator by reading this book. Highly Recommended.

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