This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: In the hills of northwestern Morocco, overlooking the river that gives the site its name, research at Oued Beht is bringing to light a previously unknown chapter of the region's past. The discovery of a substantial built structure suggests that, during the second millennium BC, communities in northwestern Africa were actively shaping their environment.
They were also engaging in broader networks of interaction across the Mediterranean world. Previous research by the Oued Beht Archaeological Project had already brought to light what is likely the earliest and largest agricultural complex ever discovered in Africa outside the Nile Valley. It dates to around 5,400–4,900 years ago.
New excavations carried out in 2023—in which we took part—have now deepened our understanding of the site. Our new study published in the journal Libyan Studies shows how we uncovered the earliest known large-scale construction of a probably defensive nature in North Africa beyond the Nile Valley. It's about 4,000–3,500 years old.
It's not known exactly what threats these wall-like structures were designed to counter. They likely relate to increasing competition over land, resources and possibly control of movement through the landscape, rather than to "invaders." Constructions like these suggest communities felt the need to protect themselves or assert power over strategic locations. This discovery pushes back the evidence for organized defensive architecture in the Maghreb and suggests that societies in this region at this time were more complex and structured than previously believed.
Our study also reveals how the ridge of Oued Beht would become a focal point again in the medieval period, during the 11th–13th centuries AD. The same defensive structure was rebuilt, a hamlet or farm was established on a nearby hilltop, and people were buried in a cemetery between the two areas. Together, these findings provide rare archaeological insights into rural communities during both prehistoric and medieval times.
They help us understand how societies developed and maintained themselves in a region too often left out of the history books. For a long time, the later prehistory of North Africa's Maghreb region (the Mediterranean countries of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia) has been poorly understood. Compared with neighboring areas such as Iberia in southwestern Europe or Athens in the eastern Mediterranean, archaeological evidence was often fragmentary.
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