Saharan trade in the Roman period: short-, medium- and long-distance trade networks

作者：Andrew Wilson · 发表于：Azania Archaeological Research in Africa · 年份：2012 · DOI：10.1080/0067270x.2012.727614 · 被引用次数：115 · 研究领域：African Studies and Geopolitics、Colonialism, slavery, and trade、African Studies and Ethnography

This paper examines the evidence for Saharan trade in the Roman period in the light of recent fieldwork in the Libyan Sahara by the Fazzan Project and the Desert Migrations Project and by the Italian Mission in the Acacus. The results of these projects suggest that trade between the Roman world and the communities of the Sahara was substantially greater than believed a few years ago and highlight the transformative effect that contact with the ancient Mediterranean had on Saharan society, especially on the Garamantes of Fazzan. But this paper also argues that in focusing chiefly on trans-Saharan commerce, much previous research has misunderstood the nature and importance of Saharan trade in antiquity. Relatively few types of goods were traded all the way across the Sahara from south to north or vice-versa in the Roman period. Rather, we should be thinking principally in terms of a network of interdependent sub-systems, of short-, medium- and long-distance exchange; the trans-Saharan traffic was only one part of this network. Moreover, Saharan trade — and especially the short- and medium-distance subsystems — also provoked transformations in the frontier zones of Roman North Africa. The abundant evidence of Roman imports to Fazzan discovered by British fieldwork there also calls into question the universal assumption that trans-Saharan trade in the medieval and modern periods exceeded the scale of trans-Saharan trade in antiquity; this is based on no good evidence at all and m...