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Tracing History in the Saharan Desert Landscapes
By Professor David Mattingly and Dr Martin Sterry, University of Leicester, UK
Most maps of early African civilisations show the Sahara as a vast empty space. It has
become the orthodox position to consider this as virtually impassable territory until the
Islamic era. Such assumptions have been possible due to the generally underdeveloped state
of archaeological and historical research in the Sahara. The ERC funded Trans-SAHARA
project is designed to challenge the idea of an empty and unconnected Saharan world in preIslamic times and at the same time to provide a new framework for writing the history of
Saharan communities. Our project builds on a programme of fieldwork I initiated on a people
called the Garamantes in the Libyan Sahara. The Garamantes can now be recognised as one
of the first Sahara civilisations, with socio-economic interconnections across the Sahara with
the other precocious states of the Mediterranean and Sub-Saharan zones. This creates a new
paradigm for the study of African civilisation.
The heartlands of the Garamantes lay in a long linear depression known as Wadi al-Ajal,
between a sand sea and a cliff-like escarpment. Their civilisation spanned the 1st millennium
BCE and 1st Millennium CE. When I first started work in Fazzan, there were just a handful of
identified Garamantian settlements. Our work has identified a complex hierarchy of
permanent settlements (towns, villages and hamlets), 100s of ancient underground irrigation
channels known as foggaras, several hundred thousand pre-Islamic burials and a rich and
diverse material culture that incorporated imports from the Mediterranean world and SubSaharan Africa. In another oasis zone related to the Garamantes close to Murzuq, an area of
2500km2, we have located 158 settlements, 184 cemeteries, 30 km2 of fields, plus a variety of
irrigation systems. Some of the sites are very large indeed and with an urban scale of
complexity. We have mapped many fortified settlements known as qsur, or qasr to use the
singular form, which sit in the middle of traces of abandoned gardens with cemeteries on
their outskirts. Clearly a limitation with the satellite image analysis is that although we can
detect morphological similarities between the sites, we cannot be certain from the imagery
alone of their relative date. However, the vast majority of qsur that we were able to visit on
the ground appeared to be Garamantian from the surface pottery recovered and this has now
been confirmed by the results of a programme of AMS radiocarbon dating. The radiocarbon
dates are very consistent, the majority falling in the Garamantian era. The combination of the
remote sensing and dating programme has provided us with a way of modelling Garamantian
demographic changes, illustrated in the lecture by using monte carlo simulation and kernel
density estimates in a GIS model.
We have confirmed the conclusions of my earlier work that the Garamantes were a
sophisticated society, built around large and populous oasis communities, practising irrigated
agriculture on a large scale and trading with partners to north and south of the Sahara. A key
issue confronting the Trans-SAHARA project has been whether this sort of development was
unique to the Garamantes, or whether oasis agriculture and trade were more widespread
phenomena in the pre-Islamic Sahara.
To test the exceptionality or otherwise of the Garamantes, we have now expanded our field of
study further and are conducting a thorough review of Saharan oases and what is known of
their origins. A significant number of oases can now be confirmed as having pre-Islamic
origins. It is apparent that there was a broad east-west chronology of oasis formation within
the Sahara, though the dates are not yet very precise for some phases. There is evidence for
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initial oasis development in the Western Desert of Egypt as early as the 3rd and 2nd millennia
BCE and oasis communities, as the Garamantes demonstrate, were well established in the
Central Sahara by the end of the 1st millennium BCE. In the early centuries CE, quite a
number of Roman forts in the frontier zone of Roman Africa were established at key oasis
locations. Our presumption now is that these forts gravitated to places where oasis
development had already occurred, rather than the other way round. Finally, there are many
other oases in the western and southern Sahara that are presumed to have been inhabited only
from the Islamic period, but our work throws serious doubt on to this assumption. Our
research opens a possibility that pre-Islamic Saharan societies were far more complex and
connected and incorporated both sedentary and pastoral elements.
To test this hypothesis, our most recent work is focussing on Wadi Draa in the Moroccan
Sahara, south of the Atlas mountains. Here again we have been able to detect large numbers
of well-preserved settlements on satellite imagery. These appear to span from pre-Islamic
times to the early modern period. As in the Libyan Sahara, the pre-Islamic activity seems to
be characterised by certain distinctive tomb types, some complex hillfort occupations and
early oasis development, possibly supported by the use of foggara irrigation technology. If
our next phase of AMS dating work on this region confirms the early origins of agriculture
and sedentary settlement here, then it also strengthens the argument that similar features
detected on satellite imagery in relation to Tunisian and Algerian oases should also be
considered of potentially early date.
Our analyses have not only been concerned with the pre-Islamic era, but also sought to
enhance knowledge and understanding of the Sahara in the medieval period. When the
Garamantian capital at Jarma declined in late antiquity, its political and economic dominance
was supplanted by the oasis of Zuwila in eastern Fazzan. This site provides a good example
of another type of analysis that is sometimes feasible from the combined evidence of sateliite
imagery, air photographs, and other archaeological data. The following images show how we
can pick apart the palimpsest landscapes detected from satellite imagery to tell the urban
biography of a Saharan centre.
Zuwila also illustrates the fragility of Saharan heritage. It is apparent that even without the
political instabilities and insecurity of recent years, Saharan archaeology is facing massive
threats. Modern development linked to oil exploration has for long been one source of
damage to Saharan archaeology, but its impact is dwarfed by the destruction of heritage due
to the expansion of modern settlements and new agricultural schemes as can be seen by how
much of the main settlement core of ancient Zuwila has been lost. We have seen repeated
examples in our mapping work of the encroachment of bulldozing, construction, planting
schemes and quarrying across the standing remains of substantial settlements.
One of the most destructive acts against Libya’s cultural heritage of recent years was due to
targeted Islamic extremism, involving a famous series of mausolea at Zuwila, long presumed
to have been the tombs of the Islamic Banu Khattab dynasty. Our AMS dating programme
has recently confirmed a 10th-century date for these extraordinary and unique monuments.
But we recently received reports that the tombs have been demolished by Salafists, an act of
vandalism confirmed by a new satellite image. Such incidents underscore the importance of
recording and dating sites, but it is even more crucial that these results are communicated to
the local communities for whom they should represent valuable cultural assets. It is only
through their involvement that we can hope to secure better protection for this amazing
Saharan heritage.