Desert tribes lived in sophisticated villages and were skilled metalworkers, says archaeologist

This article originally appeared on Culture24.

Saharan desert people formed permanent settlements and had trade links with Mediterranean, says archaeologist

An ancient Saharan people created advanced water and irrigation systems to sustain oasis agriculture in the deserts of pre and early Islamic Africa, according to a Leicester archaeologist investigating southern Libya during prehistoric times and beyond.

The nomadic tribespeople, called the Garamantes, were thought to have lived in camps dotted around the dunes of the central Sahara.

But a £1.8 million project looking at the period between 500 BC and 1500 has found that they built “sophisticated” permanent villages and urban settlements, using fossil water sources to irrigate crops and leaving behind metalworking and textiles showing skilled craftsmanship and manufacturing.

"The Sahara is often depicted as a totally hostile landscape in which only a few scattered nomads could eke out an existence prior to the expansion of Trans-Saharan trade routes in the Islamic era,” says Professor David Mattingly, who has used aerial photography and satellite imagery to draw new conclusions as part of a five-year project which has linked sub-Saharan and Mediterranean trade routes.

"The new evidence suggests that the early medieval expansion of trade and settlement built on earlier initiatives, in which the Garamantes had played a significant role.”

Other areas of the Sahara are likely to have followed suit.

“Our mapping work from satellite images has revealed similar patterns of permanent settlements and oasis farming innovation in other regions,” says Dr Martin Sterry, a Research Associate on the project.

“It looks like some of this also originated in the pre-Islamic era.”

Funded by the European Research Council, the team will continue to explore the towns, oasis agriculture and trading contacts of the indigenous population.

"This changes the whole basis of our understanding of human occupation with and contacts across the Sahara,” says Professor Mattingly.

“The desert was a much more intensely settled and interconnected region than we have previously realised.”

• Visit the project online for more.

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Source: http://www.culture24.org.uk//history-and-heritage/archaeology/art518007-desert-tribes-lived-in-sophisticated-villages-and-were-skilled-metalworkers-says-archaeologist