A tale of two deserts: Contrasting desertification histories on Rome's desert frontiers

Abstract

Understanding 'desertification', the ecological deterioration of arid lands into semi-deserts and deserts, is critical for the future well-being of the fifth of the world's population who inhabit drylands today. Many dryland regions now sparsely occupied by mobile or semi-mobile pastoralists have archaeological remains indicative of much more intensive systems of settlement and land use in the past, so archaeology has frequently been brought into debates about the respective roles of climate and people in causing desertification. While much of this work has been speculative and (in terms of modern ecological theory about drylands) rather simplistic, this paper presents a comparative study of Roman-period settlement and land use on the desert fringes of Roman Africa and Roman Arabia. The two regions provide contrasting histories of dryland farming that differed in terms of: their origins, development, and abandonment; the social and economic contexts of imperialism in which they functioned; farmers' perceptions of and responses to degradation; the scale of impact of land use on landscape; and the long-term success or failure of the strategies developed to manage processes of desertification. These very different trajectories illustrate how landscape archaeologists can contribute to understanding processes of desertification in the past, and to the desertification debate more generally.