The Garamantes: A Fresh Approach

Abstract

AbstractTraditional historiography views the Garamantes from the perspective of the Roman empire, as a peripheral people located in a remote desert. Recent field research is focussing on an inner Saharan perspective, locating the Garamantes at the very centre of trans-Saharan caravan networks. The emergence of the Garamantian state is explained in terms of the ‘longue durée’ and of ‘wide horizons’, in connection with the desertification process that precipitated changes in land use, settlement patterns, and technological availability. Toward the mid-first millennium BC the former pastoral exploitation of the environment changed to one based on oases and caravan traffic, with irrigation agriculture (supplied by foggaras) and long-distance trade (based on the dromedary). Summing up, the case of the Garamantes is presented as a clear case of tentative adaptation to climatic change: some features of the adaptation were short-lived, or required further improvement, while other features remained as definitive acquisitions in the exploitation of the arid environment.