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Four decades have passed since Harlan and Stemler ( 1976 ) proposed the eastern Sahelian zone as the most likely center of Sorghum bicolor domestication. Recently, new data on seed impressions on Butana Group pottery, from the fourth millennium BC in the southern Atbai region of the far eastern Sahelian Belt in Africa, show evidence for cultivation activities of sorghum displaying some domestication traits. Pennisetum glaucum may have been undergoing domestication shortly thereafter in the western Sahel, as finds of fully domesticated pearl millet are present in southeastern Mali by the second half of the third millennium BC, and present in eastern Sudan by the early second millennium BC. The dispersal of the latter to India took less than 1000 years according to present data. Here, we review the middle Holocene Sudanese archaeological data for the first time, to situate the origins and spread of these two native summer rainfall cereals in what is proposed to be their eastern Sahelian Sudan gateway to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean trade.

MicroCT imaging of organic inclusions within pottery sherds from Khashm el Girba 23 (KG23), Sudan, reveals domesticated sorghum (Sorghum bicolor subsp. bicolor) at c. 3700-2900 BC. The percentage of non-shattering spikelet bases was c. 73% of identifiable visualizations, with c. 27% representing wild types. These analyses demonstrate the domestication of sorghum is significantly earlier than suggested by previous archaeological 2 research. These results also demonstrate that microCT scanning is a major qualitative and quantitative advance on pre-existing methods for the investigation of crop remains in pottery sherds, which hitherto have been reliant on surface impressions; it is nondestructive, provides higher resolution 3D imaging of organic inclusions, and enables greater recovery of inclusions within a sherd. MicroCT analysis of ceramics, mudbrick and other building materials has considerable potential for improving the chronologies and resolution for the domestication of other cereals in the past.

This paper will look into the relationship between the civic-ceremonial centers of Toltec and Spiro and the intervening area along the Arkansas Valley of Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma. Although it may first appear that there were two separate developments along the Arkansas Valley, this paper presents the possibility that the centers of Toltec and Spiro were intrinsically involved with one another, and that one may have risen to preeminence at the expense of the other. Indeed, the collapse of Toltec and the rise of Spiro may explain why the Arkansas Valley east of Spiro was not heavily occupied during the early part of the Mississippian period. The discussion of these two centers along the Arkansas Valley will also be put into the perspective of the ancient Nile Valley. Here, similar developments and events led to the demise of the Nubian A-Group culture and the virtual abandonment of their territory south to the First Cataract. Using the Nile Valley as an analytical model, it will be proposed that interactions along the Arkansas River played a very important role in the development at Spiro.