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the cash and the technology—and even threw a few Mig jet fighters and tanks into the deal.
    When finished, the dam on the Nile was to form a giant lake, Lake Nasser, which not only would flood much of the inhabited Nile Valley upstream but also would submerge many ancient temples, among them the great temple of Ramses II at Abu Simbel and the beautiful temple of Isis on the Island of Philae. The archaeological world communities were outraged. Not as well publicized at the time, but also slated to be lost were several prehistoric sites in the adjacent desert earmarked for new farming projects. At the eleventh hour, however, UNESCO World Heritage sounded the alarm, and funds were quickly raised from big donors across the world. A huge international rescue operation hastily worked to save the ancient temples. The effort involved experts and engineering contractors from Europe and the United States.
    Yet while this sensational salvage operation grabbed all the headlines, another, more modest, operation went relatively unnoticed. This was the scantily funded rescue mission started in 1962 and headed by Fred Wendorf, who was then curator of the Museum of New Mexico. Fred Wendorf had set himself the daunting task of salvaging or, at the very least, documenting in detail the prehistoric sites in the Egyptian Sahara before they were lost forever. Wendorf ’s rescue operation was at first funded by the National Science Foundation of America and the U.S. State Department and was made up of an informal team of anthropologists, archaeologists, and other scientists who were given the collective name of Combined Prehistoric Expedition, or CPE. Three institutions formed the core body of the CPE: SMU, the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAS), and the Geological Survey of Egypt (GSE). In view of his credentials and seniority, Wendorf remained in charge of the CPE. In 1964 Wendorf resigned from his post at the Museum of New Mexico and joined Southern Methodist University (SMU) as head of the anthropological department—a move that allowed him to devote more time to the ongoing research in the Egyptian Sahara. In 1972, however, Wendorf handed the day-to-day operations to a Polish anthropologist, Dr. Romuald Schild. At this point, both Wendorf and Schild admitted, “Only a few signs suggested that a new archaeological dreamland is there buried in the sands
and clays.” 1 Barely a year later, however, in 1973, after Wendorf ’s fateful pee break 100 kilometers from Abu Simbel, and after they walked around the large, shallow basin and saw all the strange stone clusters and protracted alignments as well as a plethora of tumuli and potsherds strewn all over the ground, both men started to suspect that just maybe they had hit the anthropological jackpot—for this was no ordinary prehistoric site. It was a sort of unique Stone Age theme park in which mysterious events and occult ceremonies quite obviously took place. The local modern Bedouins called the region Nabta, which apparently meant “seeds.” Borrowing this name and concluding that the wide, sandy-clay basin they stood on in the desert was the bottom of a very ancient lake, Wendorf and Schild christened the site Nabta Playa.
    But what exactly is Nabta Playa, and what are the mysteries it conceals?
    CIRCLE, ALIGNMENTS, AND TUMULI
    The Egyptian Sahara—which is also known as the Eastern Sahara or Western Desert—is a vast, rectangular region that is bracketed on its four sides by the Mediterranean Sea in the north, the Nile Valley in the east, Libya in the west, and Sudan in the south. It is almost the size of France, and, apart from the five main fertile oases that run in a line from north to south, it is considered the most arid and desolate place in the world, especially the corner in the southwest, adjacent to Sudan and Libya. Because of this terrible aridity and also because some parts of it are so remote, the Egyptian Sahara remains largely