Ifri El Baroud

Description

Ifri El Baroud ("Gunpowder cave") is located at ca. 535 m above mean sea level in the Ich Chaboun mountain range (NE Morocco, Oriental), overlooking the Guerouaou plane. Major excavations were undertaken in 1995 and 1996 by a team of the Institut National des Sciences de l’Archéologie et du Patrimoine (INSAP) and the Commission for Archaeology of non-European cultures (KAAK) of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI). Those investigations enabled to identify a 3-metre thick sequence of Iberomaurusian deposits (late upper Palaeolithic) very rich in charcoal and archaeological finds. The main features of the archaeological and paleontological material have been presented in several studies and publications (see for instance, Ben-Ncer, 2004; Eiwanger and Mikdad, 1997; Eiwanger, 1998; Mikdad and Eiwanger, 2000; Mouhsine, 1998; Nami, 2001 and 2007). The new phase of work, started in 2015 in the framework of CRC 806 Projects C2, involved the investigation of an area (trench V) adjacent to the central-north sector of the 1995 excavation (trench II). The aim was to re-explore the archaeological deposit in its entirety (with more advanced standards of documentation) and to collect new high resolution samples for a detailed chronological, cultural and palaeoenvironmental reconstruction. Together with Ifri n´Ammar and Taforalt, Ifri El Baroud is one of the few sites in the whole Maghreb that yield a complete Iberomaurusian sequence and can help to understand the context of human occupation of Northwest Africa between the Last Glacial Maximum and the Younger Dryas in detail.