Can One See the Wood for the Trees in Prehistoric Egypt? A Study of Fayum Neolithic Axes

ABSTRACT

The Fayum has been known as the oldest center of cereal cultivation in prehistoric Egypt. How Egypt’s earliest Neolithic farmers lived a life is still a subject of controversy. This article focuses on Neolithic stone axes from Kom W, the type site of the Fayum Neolithic. These axes were collected and insufficiently published by the British archaeologist Gertrude Caton-Thompson in the early twentieth century, and are presently stored in the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology at University College London. A new study elucidates how these axes were made, used, repaired and recycled. These axes suggest that there was woody vegetation around Kom W and the inhabitants of this site needed to fell trees and work wood.

KEYWORDS:

• Egypt
• Fayum
• Neolithic
• lithic technology
• axe
• adze

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank all the staff of the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology at University College London for accommodating the author’s research on Gertrude Caton-Thompson’s Fayum lithic collection, and Pierre Vermeersch and anonymous reviewers for commenting on an earlier version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was made possible by a Marie Curie post-doctoral fellowship of the Gerda Henkel Foundation’s M4HUMAN Programme [file number: AZ45/EU/12] and hosted by the Institute of Archaeology at University College London. The author sincerely appreciates their support.

Notes on contributors

Noriyuki Shirai

Noriyuki Shirai studied archaeology at Waseda University in Japan. He moved to Leiden University in the Netherlands, where he obtained a PhD degree after years of research in the Fayum in Egypt. Then he moved to University College London in the UK for research on Gertrude Caton-Thompson’s Fayum lithic collection in museums. He is interested in the Neolithization of Egypt.