The Sahara as the Source - 2020

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Burials, Migration, and Identity in the Ancient Sahara and Beyond

M. C. Gatto, D. J. Mattingly, N. Ray, and M. M. Sterry (Eds.):

Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2019, 561 pp., ISBN 978-1-108-47408-5

Elizabeth A. Sawchuk
A
frican Archaeological Review (2020)Cite this article

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The diverse array of tombs, tumuli, and other funerary monuments that dot the Sahara makes it one of the most fascinating mortuary landscapes in the world. Such features also comprise a large part of the archaeological record of the last 5000 years. Yet mortuary archaeology tends to be regionally and chronologically fragmented across multiple countries with distinct academic histories and language traditions. Synthesizing burial traditions across thousands of years and 12,000,000 km2 is also no small task, which is why few sources have taken on the Sahara as a whole.

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In Burials, Migration, and Identity in the Ancient Sahara and Beyond, Gatto, Mattingly, Ray, and Sterry bring together diverse datasets from all corners of the desert using an explicitly trans-Saharan approach. Inspired by developments in Mediterranean archaeology, they reframe the desert as a great interconnected sea that can only be understood in relation to its “shorelands” on its eastern, northern, and southern peripheries. Instead of standing outside the desert looking in, as scholars and historians have done for centuries, this book is set within the Sahara looking out. Through this approach, the editors seek to understand how events and processes within this network shaped human lives across space and time.

The volume focuses on burial, migration, and identity, one of the four interdisciplinary areas explored by the Trans-SAHARA Project (2011–2017). The seventeen chapters are written by archaeologists, biological anthropologists, historians, and linguists who engage with these themes through a wide range of case studies. The aim is to critically discuss and compare evidence from across the desert for the first time. One of the ultimate objectives is to explore whether a trans-Saharan identity emerges that may help contextualize relationships and connections across this broader landscape.

By and large, the book is geographically organized. Following a comprehensive introduction led by D. J. Mattingly on the history of burial, migration, and identity research in the Sahara (which is an immensely valuable literature review), the book begins in the Central Sahara (Part I) with several chapters on Libya’s Fazzan region. Chapter 2, also led by Mattingly, is a data-heavy synthesis of > 11,000 surveyed and > 150 excavated Garamantian tombs studied by the Desert Migrations Project 2007–2011, and includes extensive descriptions of architecture, funerary furniture, grave goods, burial orientations, and human remains. M. C. Gatto and colleagues then compare these data to mortuary patterns and burial typologies in the southwestern Fazzan attributed to Garamantian contemporaries, the Atarantes. The section’s final chapters provide regional perspectives on human mobility and identity through cranial morphometrics and stable isotope analysis led by R. K. Power, and skeletal analysis led by F. Ricci.

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Of the volume’s three themes—burial, migration, and identity—burial receives the most attention and represents the greatest contribution. Compiling the history of mortuary research, key findings, major challenges, and future directions for over a dozen northern African countries is enough to put this book on any Africanist’s shelf. Many chapters also contain a wealth of previously unpublished data, photos, drawings, and detailed maps prime for comparative research. Although chapters tend to be focused on broad themes, poignant individual stories also come through, such as the young woman with a lip plug in the Fazzan who hints at sub-Saharan connections (Chapter 2) and a child with over 4000 beads and cowrie shells at Daima who signals an important social shift (Chapter 13).