Urbanisation and State Formation in the Ancient Sahara and Beyond

The themes of sedentarisation, urbanisation and state formation are fundamental ones in the archaeology of many diverse parts of the world but have been little explored in relation to early societies of the Saharan zone. Moreover, the possibility has rarely been considered that the precocious civilisations bordering this vast desert were interconnected by long-range contacts and knowledge networks. The orthodox opinion of many of the key oasis zones within the Sahara is that they were not created before the early medieval period and the Islamic conquest of Mediterranean North Africa. Major claims of this volume are that the ultimate origins of oasis settlements in many parts of the Sahara were considerably earlier, that by the first millennium AD some of these oasis settlements were of a size and complexity to merit the categorisation 'towns' and that a few exceptional examples were focal centres within proto-states or early state-level societies.

Martin Sterry is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Durham. His research on the archaeology of the Sahara and North Africa makes particular use of GIS and remote sensing. He has undertaken fieldwork on various projects in Italy, Britain, Libya and most recently southern Morocco, where he is co-director of the Middle Draa Project. He has published many articles on the Libyan Fazzan, Saharan trade, urbanisation and oasis settlements.

David J. Mattingly is Professor of Roman Archaeology at the University of Leicester. He has worked in the Sahara for forty years and is the author of many books and articles related to Saharan archaeology, such as Farming the Desert (2 volumes, 1996), which won the James R. Wiseman book award of the American Institute of Archaeology, and The Archaeology of Fazzan series (4 volumes, 2003–2013). He was the principal investigator of the European Research Council-funded Trans-SAHARA Project (2011–2017) which created the groundwork for this volume, and he is the overall series editor of Trans-Saharan Archaeology, in which this is the third of four projected volumes.