Archaeologists who work on the Tanger Peninsula in Morocco have discovered a lush and previously underestimated prehistoric landscape that is filled with old cemeteries, rock art and standing stones that together a complex picture of the ritual life in the range between 3000 and 500 BC. BC.
The finds recently published in the African archaeological overview are the highlight of years of field research, which are led by researchers from the archaeological projects by Tahadart and Kach Kouch. The Tangier peninsula is located south of the Gibraltar street and was a strategic intersection between Europe and Africa as well as between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean worlds. Such a unique geographical position would have made it easier for millennia of cultural exchange, as has now been confirmed by the complicated network of funeral traditions and symbolic sites of the peninsula.
Three cemeteries were found most of the significant, including one that contained a Cist funeral-a rock grave lined with stone slabs, which at around 2000 BC. Was suspended. This is the first such date that was preserved for a Cistbernigung in Northwest Africa, an important milestone in the early bronze time chronology in the region.
In addition to burials, archaeologists have found more than a dozen rock accommodation with paintings, including geometric motifs such as dots, squares and wavy lines as well as anthropomorphic figures that can represent people or deities. At some locations, the rocks were carved into deliberate patterns, and some accommodations were visually similar to the rock art in the Sahara and South Iberia, which indicates intercultural contacts.
Standing stones, including some that had exceeded a height of 2.5 meters, were found in the rock art and the cemetery environments. These megaliths may have served as territorial markings or have kept spiritual importance, and their cluster formation in certain places indicates a broader symbolic and ritual landscape.
The authors argue that the diversity of the grabic pit graves, hypogens, cists and tumuli and the location of monuments near prehistoric intersections reflect social changes in the long term and possibly territoriality in prehistoric population groups. It is particularly interesting that although the cremation practices in the Mediterranean in the first millennium BC.
The findings contradict the long -term prejudices in North African archeology, which have often concentrated on Roman or Nilotic contexts and neglected the later prehistoric legacy of the region. “It is a sad reality that the later prehistoric tomb and ritual landscapes of North Africa west of Egypt, despite extensive studies in the past 200 years, remain the least known and understood in the Mediterranean region,” wrote the authors of the study.