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hazards involved in such deep desert trekking, only a handful of people have ventured into this wilderness. The region is still a no-man’s-land for tourists, and very few, if any, Bedouins who roam the Egyptian Sahara go there. In fact, so uninterested were Egyptologists in these remote areas that the places were—and still are—hardly mentioned in any but the rarest of Egyptological textbooks. Oddly enough, in 1996 it was left to Hollywood to generate some interest in Gilf Kebir and Jebel Uwainat through the academy-awardwinning film
The English Patient
in which the hero supposedly crashes his single-engine plane on the western side of Gilf Kebir. Yet even then the scenes in the movie were shot not on location but in the more accessible desert of Morocco. *1 At any rate, whatever the reason, Gilf Kebir and Jebel Uwainat were not included in the Combined Prehistoric Expedition mandate. The CPE must have assumed, as most Egyptologists did in those days, that no one could have traveled such vast distances in the arid desert in ancient times, and, therefore, there could not be a direct connection between the prehistoric people of Gilf Kebir and Jebel Uwainat and the people who built and occupied Nabta Playa. We will return to this important misjudgment in the next chapter.
    In the later twentieth century another misjudgment occurred: although from 1973 to 1994 the site of Nabta Playa was the intense focus of anthropological and archaeological investigations by the CPE, it nonetheless failed to take notice of the very obvious megalithic alignments there, and it certainly did not have them checked by an astronomer. This was a rather curious oversight that even Fred Wendorf himself had trouble explaining: “The megaliths of Nabta were not recognized or identified for a long time. We began to realize their significance only in
1992. . . .” 2 and “it is not clear why we failed to recognize them previously, or rather why we failed to understand their significance during the first three field seasons 1974, 1975, and 1977 at Nabta. It was not that we did not see them because we did, but they were either regarded as bedrock or, in some instances where it was clear they were not bedrock, regarded as
insignificant.” 3
    As the author John Anthony West once remarked, archaeologists can have blindered views and miss the obvious: “[I]f you are bent on looking only for potatoes in a field of diamonds, you will miss seeing the
diamonds!” 4 To be fair to the CPE, though, the anthropo logical and archaeological evidence so far was in itself exciting stuff. Carbon-14 dating resulted in dates as far back as 7000 BCE and as recent as 3400 BCE, showing an on-and-off presence at Nabta Playa over an incredible span of years: more than three and a half millennia. The evidence at Nabta Playa also showed that at first, people came seasonally, when the lake was filled by the monsoon summer rains, arriving probably in July and staying until January, when the lake dried up again. Eventually, sometime around 6500 BCE, they figured out how to stay at Nabta Playa permanently by digging deep wells. Around 3300 BCE, however, the changes in climate made the region extremely arid, and Nabta Playa had to be abandoned. The mysterious people simply vanished, leaving behind their ceremonial complex that the CPE had discovered more than five millennia later. Its members were now at odds to understand the function and meaning of the complex.
    First the CPE was baffled by the dozen or so oval-shaped tumuli at the north side of Nabta Playa. These looked like flattened igloos made of rock debris and covered with flat slabs of stones. More baffling still was when one of these tumuli was excavated by the CPE. It was found to contain the complete skeletal remains of a young cow, and other tumuli also contained scattered bones of cattle. Wendorf christened the area “the wadi of sacrifices” and concluded that these cattle