Top image: Aerial photograph of the Oued Beht ridge and river, highlighted in color.

In a groundbreaking discovery that reshapes our understanding of Mediterranean prehistory, archaeologists uncovered the earliest and largest known agricultural complex in Africa outside the Nile Valley. Located at Oued Beht in north-western Morocco, the site belonged to a previously undocumented Neolithic farming society that thrived between 3400 and 2900 BC. The find, detailed in a 2024 Antiquity report and recently awarded the prestigious 2025 Antiquity Prize, signals the Maghreb's pivotal role in shaping the cultural landscape of the western Mediterranean.

Shifting the Prehistoric Map of the Mediterranean

The project, a collaboration between Youssef Bokbot (INSAP), Cyprian Broodbank (University of Cambridge), and Giulio Lucarini (CNR-ISPC and ISMEO), aimed to address a long-standing archaeological blind spot: the poorly understood period in Maghrebian history between 4000 and 1000 BC. Despite its position as a crossroads between Africa and Europe, boasting the narrowest maritime crossing in the region, the Maghreb's role in prehistoric Mediterranean interactions remained obscure.

"For more than a century, the last great unknown of later Mediterranean prehistory has been the role played by the societies of the Mediterranean's southern African shores west of Egypt," the authors write. "Our discoveries prove that this gap has been due not to any lack of major prehistoric activity, but to the relative lack of investigation and publishing" (Broodbank et al., 2024).

a) The north-western Maghreb, showing Oued Beht and other locations mentioned; b) the Oued Beht ridge and river, from the south-east

A Neolithic Hub of Innovation

Archaeological fieldwork at Oued Beht, situated along a ridge near the river of the same name, revealed a sprawling early agricultural settlement. The site, roughly the size of Early Bronze Age Troy, yielded rich deposits of domesticated plant and animal remains, stone tools, deep storage pits, and Neolithic pottery, making it the largest Final Neolithic farming complex yet discovered in Africa beyond the Nile.

Strikingly, the site shares structural and cultural similarities with contemporaneous settlements in Iberia, particularly in southern Spain and Portugal, where analogous deep storage pits have been excavated. These similarities, along with Iberian finds of African-origin materials such as ostrich eggshells and ivory, hint at bidirectional cultural and material exchange across the Strait of Gibraltar.

Stone tools from Oued Beht: e & f) polished axes; g) axe/adze preform; h) serrated sickle element; i) rectilinear sickle element; j) circular endscraper; k) product from bipolar percussion.

The Maghreb's Forgotten Role in Prehistoric Connectivity

This new evidence positions Oued Beht and the north-west Maghreb as key players in the emergence of complex societies across the western Mediterranean during the fourth and third millennia BC. As the study emphasizes":

It is crucial to consider Oued Beht within a wider co-evolving and connective framework embracing peoples on both sides of the Mediterranean-Atlantic gateway... and to recognise it as a distinctively African-based community that contributed substantially to the shaping of that social world" (Broodbank et al., 2024).

A Landmark for African and Mediterranean Archaeology

The findings challenge the long-held Nile-centric view of early African complexity and demand a reassessment of Africa's western coastal contributions to early Mediterranean civilization. With this discovery, Morocco-and the broader Maghreb-can no longer be seen as peripheral to the story of ancient innovation and exchange.

The research was published in the journal Antiquity and can be read in full for free: https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2024.101