New Data on Plant Use in the Eastern Sahara: The Macro-Remain Assemblage from Sheikh el-Obeiyid Villages and Bir el-Obeiyid Playa, Farafra Oasis, Egyptian Western Desert

This article discusses archaeobotanical evidence from two Sheikh el-Obeiyid villages and the Bir el-Obeiyid playa, which are located along the course of the Wadi el-Obeiyid and on the top and escarpment of the Northern Plateau, at the northern edge of the Farafra Oasis, Egypt. The villages and playa are both part of a settlement system which developed from the top of the plateau, through its various erosion surfaces, down to the bottom of the wadi. The villages in particular can be considered as seasonal base camps, populated by semi-sedentary groups who engaged in intensive exploitation of the resources available in the surrounding environment during the early and mid-Holocene. These sites can be compared to the better-known Hidden Valley village site located only 20 km to the east, the remains from which were analysed during the early 2000s by Ahmed G. Fahmy. At all the sites investigated to date in Farafra there is clear evidence for gathering and use of sorghum and other species of small-seeded wild grasses, fitting the emerging patterns of intense wild grass exploitation in attractive ecological zones for the eastern Sahara during the 9th–6th millennia BP.

Exploring jet substructure in semi-visible jets

Semi-visible jets arise in strongly interacting dark sectors, where parton evolution includes dark sector emissions, resulting in jets overlapping with missing transverse momentum. The implementation of semi-visible jets is done using the Pythia Hidden valley module to duplicate the QCD sector showering. In this work, several jet substructure observables have been examined to compare semi-visible jets (signal) and light quark/gluon jets (background). These comparisons were performed using different dark hadron fractions in the semi-visible jets. The extreme scenarios where signal consists either of entirely dark hadrons or visible hadrons offers a chance to understand the effect of the specific dark shower model employed in these comparisons. We attempt to decouple the behaviour of jet-substructure observables due to inherent semi-visible jet properties, from model dependence owing to the existence of only one dark shower model as mentioned above.