A fortified wall and parallel ditch at Morocco’s Oued Beht date to 2010 BC

Charcoal from the earliest phase of a fortification wall at Oued Beht in northwestern Morocco has produced two radiocarbon ranges, 1896 to 1623 BC and 2010 to 1747 BC. The older limit of the second range, 2010 BC, is the earliest the sample allows, and it anchors a paper published online on September 7, 2026 that gives the site its first evidence of second-millennium BC activity. The team behind it, led by Giulio Lucarini and Cyprian Broodbank, spans Italian, Moroccan, British, Spanish and French institutions and had previously known Oued Beht as a settlement of a far earlier age.

Ranges of this width are normal for the period, and reading them correctly is most of the story. Neither date fixes a year, but both put the first wall centuries before the Iron Age.

A burnt-daub wall and a ditch that follows it

The finding comes from the 2023 field season, reported in Libyan Studies. Six new trenches went in that year, and the team dated 24 samples. The paper’s central result is that a linear feature called Wall B1, long treated as a single structure, is really two: an earlier phase built of charcoal-rich ashy silt and burnt daub, and a later stone-built one about 2.3 metres wide and 1.35 metres high. Only the earlier phase yielded the two ranges above. A ditch, catalogued as F.312, was excavated running parallel to the walls, and the paper says the 2023 investigations provide the first evidence of activity at Oued Beht in the second millennium BC, expanding understanding of the site beyond the Final Neolithic.

Archaeology Magazine’s summary of the paper describes a large ditch and raised earthwork built between the beginning and middle of the second millennium BC, closing off the southern end of the settlement along a natural ridge. It cites 17 new radiocarbon measurements for the construction sequence.

What a calibrated range does and does not say

A radiocarbon result is a probability band, not a birthday. The two ranges from the earliest wall overlap between about 1896 and 1747 BC, which is where the charcoal is most likely to have burned. The 2010 BC end is the earliest that the older sample allows, so the wall was raised sometime in a window of a few centuries, most plausibly inside the shared overlap.

The Debrief’s account of the paper adds that later deposits date to roughly 1530 to 1300 BC and that multiple burning horizons in a trench 46.5 feet long suggest the barrier was built, burned and repaired repeatedly. It also suggests the earliest wall may have used timber or organic material covered with daub, which would explain why the burnt daub survives as a charcoal-rich layer while no standing masonry of that phase does.

Press coverage has called this the oldest defensive system in North Africa outside Egypt. The paper’s own abstract makes no such ranking, so the claim belongs to the coverage and not to the excavators’ findings.

A ridge that was once an open farming town

Oued Beht was already known before the wall. An Antiquity paper of 2024 by Broodbank, Lucarini and colleagues described a Final Neolithic settlement of about 3400 to 2900 BC with 9 to 10 hectares of dense artefacts, hundreds of bell-shaped storage pits at roughly one per 10 square metres, domesticated barley, wheat, peas and livestock, and more than 16,000 pottery sherds. The authors called it the earliest and largest agricultural complex in Africa beyond the Nile corridor.

Roughly a thousand years after the Neolithic settlement had faded, the same ridge was fortified. The Debrief reports that activity moved from the open northern ridge to a smaller southern spur between the river and a ravine, a naturally protected position. The earlier fieldwork report covering 2021 and 2022 documented the two seasons of fieldwork that preceded the 2023 trenches.

Why Lucarini reads it as planned public works

Speaking to Live Science, Lucarini said that “a work like this is not improvised. It requires planning, choosing the right spot in the topography, and mobilising and coordinating labour over time.” The ditches, ramparts and walls, built of clay, ash, silt and stone, lie about 50 miles east of Rabat.

Lucarini added that the communities of the north-western Maghreb in the second millennium BC “were capable of conceiving and carrying out major construction works on a scale that had not previously been documented.” Across the Strait, Iberian El Argar communities of the same era lived in fortified settlements with metalworking and social hierarchy. Oued Beht’s defences were smaller than the Iberian ones, but Live Science reports they show a comparable investment in collective infrastructure during a period of wider Mediterranean change, and that the pits point to grain storage on a scale exceeding local needs.

The 2023 trenches also turned up numerous bell-shaped pits, which the paper says likely served for “storage (most plausibly of crops) on a considerable scale”. Which of them belong to the Bronze Age community behind the wall, and which to the Neolithic farmers before it, is a question the paper leaves for later seasons.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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