The ridge stretches over seven kilometers at altitudes between 556 and 898 meters, with six caves on its southeastern face. The main cave, GLD1, is 80 meters long and sits 507 meters above sea level. French researchers de Beaumais and Royer first excavated it in the 1920s, discovering polished stone tools that associated the site with the early Neolithic. But those early digs lacked proper chrono-stratigraphic analysis, and the findings sat largely uncontextualized for decades. When Algeria's National Center of prehistoric anthropological and historical research (CNRPAH) resumed excavations in 2010, modern methods revealed a far richer picture: GLD1's deposits extend more than five meters deep, containing mammal bones, mollusc shells, plant remains, ceramics, lithic and bone tools, and ornaments made from gastropod shells, bird bones, tortoise shells, and ostrich eggshells.

The caves' most significant contribution to North African prehistory lies in what they reveal about the transition from hunting and gathering to herding and cultivation -- the process archaeologists call Neolithisation. The introduction of domesticated sheep and goats at Gueldaman dates to the 6th and 7th millennia before present. Zooarchaeological analysis of the macro-mammal remains shows a shift in how livestock herds were managed: from pure meat production to a diversified economy that also exploited secondary products like milk and hides. Some of the artifacts found in the caves suggest long-distance trade networks, connecting this mountain cave to communities far beyond the Soummam valley. Gueldaman may be the key to understanding how the entire region transitioned between these two fundamentally different ways of living.

In 2015, an international consortium of geologic and meteorological institutes published a study that examined a prolonged drought in the Mediterranean and northern Africa approximately 4,200 years ago. The evidence from Gueldaman supported a striking hypothesis: this climate anomaly may have played a decisive role in disrupting local cultures and driving the abandonment of the cave settlements. The 4.2-kiloyear event, as climatologists call it, coincided with the collapse of several civilizations around the Mediterranean basin. At Gueldaman, the evidence is particularly direct -- after thousands of years of occupation, the deposits simply stop. People who had lived in these caves since the Paleolithic, who had learned to domesticate animals and trade across distances, walked away. The water deity's mountain ran dry.

Caves GLD2 and GLD3 were investigated for the first time between 2010 and 2012, yielding indices of human occupation similar to those in GLD1. Excavations in Sector 2 and Sector 3 progressed slowly due to the firmness of the deposits and clay floors, and bedrock was not reached. The site's potential remains largely unrealized -- a common frustration in North African archaeology, where funding and institutional support often lag behind the scale of what the ground contains. Because Holocene-era cultures are poorly understood in this region, Gueldaman could be the Rosetta Stone for an entire chapter of human development. The ridge named for a water god holds answers that have waited 4,200 years for someone to dig deep enough to find them.