“This well-presented volume is a very timely addition to the growing body of literature on the prehistory of Northeast Africa. It illustrates the value of using the landscape and local approaches in understanding prehistoric archaeology. The multidisciplinary nature of the project has allowed the team to illuminate the distinct character of Fayumi archaeology…”
— G.J. Tassie, African Archaeological Review, 2017

The Neolithic in Egypt is thought to have arrived via diffusion from an origin in southwest Asia. In this volume, the authors advocate an alternative approach to understanding the development of food production in Egypt based on the results of new fieldwork in the Fayum. They present a detailed study of the Fayum archaeological landscape using an expanded version of low-level food production to organize observations concerning paleoenvironment, socioeconomy, settlement, and mobility.

While domestic plants and animals were indeed introduced to the Fayum from elsewhere, when a number of aspects of the archaeological record are compared, a settlement system is suggested that has no obvious analogues with the Neolithic in southwest Asia. The results obtained from the Fayum are used to assess other contemporary sites in Egypt.