221 Taramsa 1, Egypt Pierre M. Vermeersch Location and Research History On the left bank of the Nile, south of the town of Qena in Upper Egypt, several chert extraction sites in the desert near the village of Taramsa have been the focus of archaeological explorations since the 1980s (Vermeersch et al., 1995). The site of Taramsa-1 is one of them. It was discovered in 1985 during a survey by the Belgian Middle Egypt Prehistoric Project of Leuven University (Vermeersch et al., 1987). It was registered as site E85/2. Excavations were carried out by the team in 1989, 1991, and 1994. In 2001, S. Stokes and R. Bailey from the Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art at Oxford (UK) performed sediment sampling and gamma spectrometry for optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating. A fnal report was published by the team in 2010 (Van Peer et al., 2010). Taramsa 1, c. 2.5 km southeast of the Dendera temple, is an isolated hill sur- rounded by wadis (Fig. 1). It lies at 26.12 N, 32.68 E and reaches a height of 115 m above sea level (masl) and is c. 15 m above the surrounding wadi surface. It is capped by a desert pavement consisting of mainly chert cobbles. A black desert varnish on the cobbles of the pavement is responsible for the peculiar aspect of the Taramsa hill, which appears as a black hill in a yellow desert. P. M. Vermeersch (*) Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium e-mail: pierre.vermeersch@kuleuven.be © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Beyin et al. (eds.), Handbook of Pleistocene Archaeology of Africa, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20290-2_12