A tale of two deserts: contrasting
deserti® cation histories on Rome’s
desert frontiers
Graeme Barker
Abstract
Understanding ‘desertiŽcation’, the ecological deterioration of arid lands into semi-deserts and
deserts, is critical for the future well-being of the Žfth of the world’s population who inhabit drylands
today. Many dryland regions now sparsely occupied by mobile or semi-mobile pastoralists have
archaeological remains indicative of much more intensive systems of settlement and land use in the
past, so archaeology has frequently been brought into debates about the respective roles of climate
and people in causing desertiŽcation. While much of this work has been speculative and (in terms
of modern ecological theory about drylands) rather simplistic, this paper presents a comparative
study of Roman-period settlement and land use on the desert fringes of Roman Africa and Roman
Arabia. The two regions provide contrasting histories of dryland farming that differed in terms of:
their origins, development, and abandonment; the social and economic contexts of imperialism in
which they functioned; farmers’ perceptions of and responses to degradation; the scale of impact of
land use on landscape; and the long-term success or failure of the strategies developed to manage
processes of desertiŽcation. These very different trajectories illustrate how landscape archaeologists
can contribute to understanding processes of desertiŽcation in the past, and to the desertiŽcation
debate more generally.
Keywords
DesertiŽcation; landscape archaeology; oodwater farming; mining; Roman imperialism.
Archaeology and desertiŽcation debates
Ever since Aubreville coined the term in 1949, ‘desertiŽcation’ has been widely used by
geographers to signify the ecological deterioration of arid lands into semi-deserts or
deserts: McGregor and Nieuwolt (1998), for example, deŽne desertiŽcation as the process
by which dryland conditions are brought into areas where such conditions did not previously exist. If hyper-arid zones which cannot be susceptible to further desertiŽcation are
excluded from the calculation, almost 40 per cent of the world’s drylands today can be
World Archaeology Vol. 33(3): 488–507 Ancient Ecodisasters
© 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd ISSN 0043-8243 print/1470-1375 online
DOI: 10.1080/00438240120107495
A tale of two deserts
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described as ‘desertiŽed’, 16 per cent of the overall land area (Le Houerou 1996).
However, the term ‘desertiŽcation’ has been used in different ways by different scholars
in terms of the causal processes its use represents. Some authors have used the term to
refer to land degradation caused by climatic change (sustained aridiŽcation), but most
prefer to use it to refer to the effects of human actions (Fantechi and Margaris 1986).
Thomas and Middleton (1994: 9–10), for example, deŽne desertiŽcation as ‘land degradation in arid, semi-arid, and dry sub-humid areas resulting mainly from adverse human
impact’. Climate and people can of course work in tandem to degrade dryland environments, as may be the case in the context of global warming today (Le Houerou 1996;
Millington and Pye 1994). Drylands support over a Žfth of the world’s population, and
arid and semi-arid lands together support over a third, so understanding the long-term
effects of climate and people on arid lands is certainly critical for the future well-being of
a large proportion of the world’s population. According to Tolba and el-Kholy (1992), the
current rate of desertiŽcation is about 60,000 km2 a year, 0.11 per cent per year of the
world’s dryland regions, a calculation which would signify that over 70 per cent of the
world’s drylands, amounting to a quarter of the world’s land surface, are under threat.
The rich archaeology of many of the world’s drylands has commonly been brought into
the debates about the causes of desertiŽcation, because many dryland regions now
sparsely occupied by mobile or semi-mobile pastoralists have archaeological remains
suggesting that these same arid and degraded landscapes must once have supported settlement of a very different order of intensity (Barker and Gilbertson 2000). This is nowhere
more so than in the case of the archaeology of the southern and eastern frontier regions
of the Roman empire, in North Africa and the Levant (Plate 1). Following on from the
speculations of early European travellers and explorers (e.g. Barth 1857; Musil 1907;
Palmer 1872), archaeologists, historians and historical geographers have frequently
debated the implications of the spectacular Roman ruins of these regions for understanding processes of environmental change. Was the ‘greening of the desert’ in Roman
times essentially a matter of new know-how, of the introduction of sophisticated technologies and cropping systems? Or was climatic change the key factor, more abundant
rainfall allowing crops to be grown by Roman farmers in areas where this is impossible
today? And what caused the green Želds of antiquity to become the degraded and
denuded landscapes of today? Had a return to aridity caused arable farming to be abandoned? Had people sowed the seeds of their own destruction through their greed and
stupidity, stripping the landscape for building timber and fuelwood and/or allowing their
animals to overgraze the vegetation (Hughes with Thirgood 1982)? Or perhaps had
factors such as moral or economic decline caused these societies to abandon maintaining
their land in good order? Had unsuitable or over-intensive systems of irrigation ruined
soil fertility through salinization?
Most of this debate has been characterized more by speculation than evidence-based
discussion, usually producing deceptively attractive and straightforward models of change
in which agency can be clearly recognized as either climatic change or ‘human impact’, all
grist to the mill of popular media treatments of desert archaeology. In many countries, too,
debates about past desert settlement have been and are still shaped by present-day political agendas: the (assumed) pastoralism of the ancient tribes of Israel is a force for good in
the Old and New Testaments, for example, yet it was ‘destructive Arab pastoralists’ (again,
490 Graeme Barker
Plate 1 A Roman-period fortiŽed farm and its ancillary buildings at Ghirza in the Tripolitanian
pre-desert, Libya, in an area of
less than 25mm of rainfall today.
(Kite photograph by G. D. B.
Jones).
assumed, and in this case wrongly so: Ballais 2000; Rosen 2000) that destroyed the Roman
urban societies of the Near East and North Africa. Likewise, the farming systems of
indigenous peoples in North American drylands have been characterized variously as
destructive or benign according to changing colonial and post-colonial agendas (Minnis
2000).
The likelihood that many if not most archaeological and historical models of dryland
settlement history have been far too simplistic is indicated by the emphasis of modern
ecological theory on the complexity of drylands today. Drylands are not homogeneous
entities with broadly similar environments, and the processes maintaining or transforming them ‘involve synergies and subleties at a variety of time and spatial scales’ (Spellman
2000: 38). There are major debates about the inevitability or avoidability of humanly
induced desertiŽcation in drylands today. Beaumont (1993: 474) predicted bleakly that
desertiŽcation was an inevitable price to be paid by many of the world’s poorest nations:
A tale of two deserts
491
‘land degradation may be a sacriŽce which has to be paid in order that local populations
can survive future drought or famine’. Other geographers, however, have pointed to
examples of land degradation in arid or semi-arid regions being reversed by local people
making small-scale technological investments such as terrace construction and tree planting, in the context of population growth and market opportunities, for example in Kenya
(Mortimore 1998; Thomas and Middleton 1994; Tiffen et al. 1994) and Burkino Faso
(Lean 1994). ‘It is clear that difŽcult problems remain to be resolved before the magnitude and signiŽcance of human–environment–climate interactions today can be fully
elucidated, let alone those in the distant past’ (Spellman 2000: 38).
One of the problems with much research on desert settlement history has been the lack
of inter-disciplinary studies by archaeologists, historians and geographers, working
together in the same region (Spooner 1989). Single-discipline research has yielded important information about climate, and/or environment, and/or human settlement, but most
models of the structure and agency of landscape change arising from such case studies can
be criticized for not being in a position to compare similarly high-quality data sets about
all three processes. Modern landscape archaeology, however, integrates the methodologies of the archaeological, social and environmental sciences at the regional scale and
frequently over long time scales. Hence it has the potential to address, in Spellman’s
terms, the human–environment–climate interactions of the distant past: to identify past
societies’ solutions and choices (both good and bad) for living in drylands, to ascertain in
what circumstances human settlement was sustainable, when it caused damage from
which the landscape was able to recover and when it degraded arid and semi-arid lands
to the point of no return. Recent studies of Roman-period archaeology in North Africa
and the Levant provide examples of how landscape archaeologists can provide answers
to such questions and so contribute fruitfully to understanding processes of desertiŽcation in the past, and to the desertiŽcation debate more generally.
Roman Africa: the UNESCO Libyan Valleys Survey
The UNESCO Libyan Valleys Survey was an inter-disciplinary study of desert-edge settlement and land use in part of Tripolitania in north-west Libya (Barker et al. 1996a; Fig. 1).
With annual precipitation today diminishing rapidly from about 100mm in the northern
edge of this ‘pre-desert’ zone to less than 25mm, the area has traditionally been inhabited
by transhumant pastoralists who camp here in the summer and winter to the south much
further into the Sahara. These people are highly mobile, relying on ocks and herds
(sheep, goats, camels) and cultivating small patches of cereals on the oors of the dry
valleys or wadis after the autumn rains. The ephemeral archaeology created by this lifestyle contrasts strikingly with the hundreds of Roman-period stone farmhouses (gsur or
‘castles’ in arabic) spaced at regular intervals along the edges of the wadis, associated with
systems of stone Želd-walls that appeared to be prima facie evidence for sedentary
farming (Plates 1 and 2). Earlier reconnaissance by Goodchild in particular had indicated
that many of these dated between the third and Žfth centuries AD, and he proposed that
they represented an imperially-established system of defence in depth against the desert
tribes to the south, with ex-soldiers (limitanei) being settled and allocated land to farm
Figure 1 Tripolitania, north-west Libya, showing the principal landforms and settlements, and the location of the UNESCO Libyan Valleys Survey.
The 200mm, 100mm, 50mm and 25mm dashed lines are rainfall isohyets. The contours are in metres.
A tale of two deserts
493
around their fortiŽed settlements (Goodchild 1950a, 1950b, 1952–53a; Goodchild and
Ward-Perkins 1949). He argued that the system collapsed when the frontier had to be
moved northwards in the context of tribal attacks, but that it was already greatly weakened by the degrading effects of intensive agriculture on the pre-desert landscape (Goodchild 1952–3b). Our project was asked by UNESCO to focus on this archaeology because
the Libyan government was keen to understand what had been farmed, and how, to
inform its plans for future development.
We quickly established that the gsur were only the second phase of an extraordinary
orescence in pre-desert settlement in the Roman period. Until the late Žrst century AD,
settlement in the pre-desert was small-scale and mobile, much as in recent centuries, but
at that point there was a dramatic transformation in settlement with the appearance of
hundreds of courtyard farms, many built in the recognizably Roman style of opus
Africanum. During the course of the third century AD these were replaced by fortiŽed
versions, the gsur. The gsur in the most arid southern regions were generally abandoned
in the Žfth century AD, but elsewhere we found that most gsur continued in occupation
into the sixth or seventh centuries, while in the northernmost part of the study area some
of them were abandoned only very recently. Another Žnding by the project was that
inscriptions at several open farms and gsur, or at associated funerary sites, demonstrated
Plate 2 Romano-Libyan oodwater farming in the Wadi Gobbeen in the Libyan pre-desert. A wadiedge diversion wall is visible in the right foreground, and a series of cross-wadi walls down the wadi
in the distance, with a fortiŽed farm on the horizon on the right (photograph: G. Barker).
494 Graeme Barker
that their builders were in fact indigenous Libyans, ‘Romano-Libyans’ as we termed them,
rather than colonists or limitanei (Mattingly 1983, 1987).
Detailed Želd and laboratory studies in geomorphology and palaeoecology by the
project team established that the climate of the Tripolitanian pre-desert over the past 3000
years has in fact been essentially the same as today, apart from a wetter episode that may
equate with the Little Ice Age in Europe (Gilbertson and Hunt, with Smithson 1996). In
this part of Roman Africa at least, climatic change clearly cannot be cited as a primary
reason for the greening of the desert or for its piecemeal abandonment (Gilbertson 1996).
Instead, we were able to show from investigations of the Želd systems associated with a
representative series of open farms and gsur that Romano-Libyan farmers practised
rather sophisticated oodwater farming. They built walls to divert surface runoff after
seasonal storms, so that they could channel the oodwaters down from the plateau edges
into the Želds they laid out on the wadi oors (Gilbertson and Hunt 1996; see also Plate
2 and Fig. 2).
By collecting together the surface runoff from a large area and channelling it into a
small area of protected Želds, these farmers were able to grow a wide range of crops that
needed much more water than was available in terms of annual rainfall levels. These crops
included three cereals (six-row hulled barley, durum or hard wheat and bread wheat),
three pulse crops (lentil, pea and grass pea), four oil plants (olive, safower, linseed or
ax and castor), Žve Mediterranean fruits (grape, Žg, pomegranate, almond, peach), Žve
African fruits (date palm, water melon, wild pistachio, the Christ-thorn and sumach) and
three herbs (purslane, dill and celery) (Van der Veen et al. 1996). Many farms have stone
pressing structures for making oil and wine, and vat capacities indicate that most farms
were producing a surplus well beyond the needs of the inhabitants. Pastoralism, by
contrast, appears to have been small scale: the principal animals kept were sheep and
goats, their dung indicating that they were stalled part of the year on the farms. Their
water and pasture needs would have been competing with those of the people and crops,
and the abundance of wild animals such as gazelle in the farm middens suggests that they
were hunted as much for their meat as to protect the vulnerable crops on the wadi oors.
The conclusion of the project was that indigenous Libyan élites in the pre-desert
switched to cash-crop farming in response to the opportunities of Romanization in the
Žrst century AD (Mattingly 1996). The indicators of surplus production in the pre-desert
farms chime with epigraphic evidence from the major Roman fort of Bu Ngem (see Fig.
1 for its location) that the local population was supplying the military with agricultural
commodities such as olive oil. Oil was probably also sent to the urban markets on the
coast. The shift to fortiŽed farms in the third century AD was primarily an indicator of
internal social tensions and competitive behaviours among these élites. The decline of the
system was also a gradual process: people in the most marginal locations soon returned
to traditional lifestyles, whereas gsur farming continued apace further north, mostly in
response to Roman markets; and in certain wadis local warlords appear to have retained
control over their peasant farmers and maintained their oodwater-farming systems until
the Arab conquest and beyond.
The study of sediments associated with several farms, for example in midden deposits,
building inŽlls and cistern conduits, found indicators for local landscape erosion at a few
sites that might reect the pressures of overgrazing and fuel-wood collection. However,
Figure 2 Plan of the Romano-Libyan oodwater farming systems in the Wadi Gobbeen in the Libyan pre-desert.
496 Graeme Barker
there was no evidence to suggest that environmental degradation was on such a scale as
to have been a signiŽcant factor in the decline of the system and the return to traditional
pastoral lifestyles (Gilbertson 1996). In fact, there are several indicators that many
Romano-Libyan desert farmers in Tripolitania were well aware of the need for conservation strategies: some sluices had been blocked, presumably so that smaller quantities of
oodwater could enter the Želds; stalling was presumably in part for the production of
manure to fertilize the Želds; and the concurrence of evidence for stalling and for active
vegetation growth in some sediment sequences indicates awareness of the relationship
between animals and vegetation, and of steps being taken to maintain it to the farmers’
advantage.
The cultivation of tree and ground crops, the widespread harvesting of water, the
improvement of forage, the maintenance of controlled grazing systems, the construction of walls and terraces, the concentrated inputs of nutrients from animals – all these
components of the land use system must have tipped the balance at many locations in
favour of the surface vegetation cover and soil stability, and against uvially-accelerated soil erosion.
(Gilbertson 1996: 277)
Roman Arabia: the Wadi Faynan Landscape Survey
The Wadi Faynan Landscape Survey is investigating the landscape history of the Wadi
Faynan in southern Jordan, with a primary focus on the 10,000 years of the Holocene from
the Neolithic to the present day (Barker 2000). The Wadi Faynan is one of a series of
major wadi systems that dissect the western escarpment of the Jordanian plateau and ow
westwards down into the Wadi Arabah rift valley (Fig. 3). The catchment of the wadi is
about 15 kilometres west/east and 5 kilometres north/south, and we have concentrated on
the central sector, surveying in detail an area measuring just over 30 km2 (Fig. 4). The
climate on the escarpment is semi-arid, with an annual rainfall of some 200mm, so the
villages there practise Mediterranean-style farming, growing cereals, olives, vines, and so
on, whereas the Wadi Faynan, only a few hours’ walk down the escarpment, is rainless for
most of the year and sparsely vegetated. Traditionally it has been used for seasonal grazing
by Bedouin from plateau settlements, though today it is used mainly by landless nomadic
pastoralists who are based in the Wadi Arabah.
At the centre of the wadi, where a series of tributaries join to form the main channel,
there is a major settlement of Nabataean (pre-Roman Late Iron Age), Roman and Byzantine (late Roman) date called Khirbet Faynan (Plate 3), the ‘Ruin of Faynan’. The hillslopes around the settlement are black with slag, the residues of ancient smelting, and the
surrounding hills are honeycombed with ancient mineshafts, for the area is rich in copper
and lead ores. The history of mining and metal-working in the Faynan region has been
the subject of intensive study by a team from Bochum Mining Museum. They have
demonstrated that industrial activity began in the Chalcolithic c. 5000 BC and expanded
in scale in the following millennia to climax in Roman and Byzantine times (Hauptmann
1989, 1992, 2000; Hauptmann et al. 1992). Khirbet Faynan is commonly identiŽed as the
A tale of two deserts
497
Figure 3 The location of
Wadi Faynan within its
region.
settlement or town of Phaino mentioned in classical sources as the regional control centre
of copper and lead extraction in Roman times (there is a reference to Christian slaves
from Palestine and Egypt being consigned to work its mines). Extending for some 5 kilometres to the west of Khirbet Faynan is a substantial Želd system demarcated by hundreds
of drystone walls (Fig. 4, Plates 3 and 4), its surface pottery indicating primary use contemporary with the settlement. Clearly, the abundant archaeological remains of the Wadi
Faynan indicate patterns of settlement and land use in classical antiquity very different
from modern Bedouin pastoralism.
Through the Žve seasons of Želdwork the Želd system, some 1000 Želds, has been
dissected by painstaking study of every Želd surface and wall, the archaeology of the
surrounding landscape has been mapped in considerable detail, and the resulting archaeological sequence contextualized within an environmental sequence established by geomorphology, palynology and geochemistry (Barker et al. 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000). The Žrst
major contrast with the Tripolitanian study is the fact that the Želd system represents a
Figure 4 The survey area of the Wadi Faynan Landscape Survey, showing the ancient Želd systems at the centre and archaeological sites mapped
around it. The topography shown is from a photogrammetric map, the boundaries of which do not extend as far as the boundaries of the survey area.
A tale of two deserts
499
Plate 3 Looking north-east across the ancient Želd system in Wadi Faynan to Khirbet Faynan (the
prominent hill in the right middle ground); the Želds visible are mainly Nabataean in date (see Fig.
5) (photograph: G. Barker).
palimpsest of oodwater farming activity that began c. 4000 BC. At that time, in the context
of signiŽcant aridiŽcation, Early Bronze Age farmers started to build simple check dams
across the oors of low-gradient and minor wadi channels to trap storm waters and the
sediments being moved by them. By the early Žrst millennium BC, the Edomite Iron Age,
more sophisticated methodologies were developed, whereby the oodwaters were gathered by massive diversion walls laid out along hillslopes and channelled to wadi-oor Želds.
Nabataean farmers in the centuries immediately before the Roman annexation of the
region (AD 106) used the same principles of diversion-wall oodwater farming, but they
applied them much more effectively by concentrating their efforts on the several small
wadis dissecting the steeper slopes on the southern side of Faynan (Plate 3 and Fig. 5). They
built check dams across the wadi channels high up on the hillslopes, linked to short diversion walls that carried the oodwaters along the contour of the slopes. The oodwaters
were then managed through simple sluices (gaps) and spillways (step structures) onto a
succession of terraced Želds below. In the Roman/Byzantine period the Želd system was
considerably enlarged across the almost at oor of the main wadi (Plate 4 and Fig. 5). An
ingenious system of long channels was constructed to tap the water in the tributary wadis
and divert it hundreds of metres to a series of discrete ‘estates’ laid out on the oor of the
main wadi. Our GIS modelling of water ow indicates that water resources were shared
down the length of the Želd system. Wadi Faynan had become a highly organized imperial estate organized by the Khirbet Faynan garrison, with extensive Želd systems carefully
500 Graeme Barker
Plate 4 Looking west from the top of Khirbet Faynan across the main channel of the Wadi Faynan
to the ancient Želd system; the Želds visible are mainly late Roman/Byzantine in date (see Fig. 5)
(photograph: G. Barker).
managed and farmed to feed the industrial workers operating the mines and smelting
works.
In striking contrast with the gradual (and indeed partial) demise of oodwater farming
in the Tripolitanian pre-desert, this remarkable agricultural enterprise went out of use in
its entirety, relatively quickly, in the later centuries of the Roman empire. Alongside palynological studies to measure landscape impacts in terms of activities such as wood-cutting
and grazing, we have used geochemical techniques (EDMA – Energy Dispersive X-Ray
Micro-Analysis) to measure the nature and scale of environmental pollution caused by
the copper and lead mining and smelting – the mining waste produced pollutants that were
washed out into the landscape by water ow, and the smelting threw out pollutants into
the atmosphere that in due course were also encorporated into sediments. There is overwhelming evidence from these studies that the collapse of intensive settlement and land
use in the Wadi Faynan, and the development of the present-day degraded landscape,
were directly related to the intensity of Roman industrial activity (Gilbertson et al. 1999;
Hunt and Mohammed 1998; Pyatt et al. 1999).
For the Early Bronze Age, alongside indications of small-scale soil erosion in the
geomorphological record, we have pollen evidence for vegetation degradation on a small
scale that probably reects a combination of grazing impact and fuel-wood cutting for
smelting, together with geochemical signatures of small-scale localized environmental
pollution from smelting. By contrast, the classical landscape was progressively and
A tale of two deserts
501
Figure 5 The distribution of (above) Nabataean and (below) Late Roman and Byzantine pottery
in the ancient Želd system in Wadi Faynan. Nabataean farmers concentrated their oodwater
farming activities on steeper slopes on the southern margins of the system (the part of the Želd
system shown in Plate 3), whereas Roman/Byzantine farming expanded over the almost at terrain
of the northern sector (the part of the Želd system shown in Plate 4).
massively eroded, degraded, and polluted. Pollen of Nabataean and early Roman date
indicates a steppic landscape around Khirbet Faynan in which olives and vines were being
cultivated, but the landscape then rapidly developed into the extremely desertic environment that we Žnd today. Charcoal residues collected from the mining sites indicate that
fuel-wood had to be brought down from the plateau by Roman miners, whereas local
sources were still being used in Nabataean times (Engel 1993). Erosion made the oodwater farming systems increasingly less effective as gullying lowered the depth of water
ow below diversion walls. Most strikingly, geochemical studies of a long sediment
sequence in ponded deposits immediately below Khirbet Faynan indicate extraordinarily
high levels of metallurgical pollution in Roman times, many times higher than modern
safety limits – Figure 6 shows levels of copper, but these are also mirrored in terms of
lead, barium and many other toxins.
Furthermore, we have established that the modern biomass and cover values of barley
plants growing in the wadi increase signiŽcantly with distance from the contamination ‘hot
spots’ such as Khirbet Faynan (Pyatt et al. 1999). The implication is that metal pollution
was probably also affecting the productivity of the crops being grown in the Želd system
502 Graeme Barker
Figure 6 The distribution of copper (in parts per million – ppm) through sediments by Khirbet
Faynan, the focus of the Roman mining and smelting industry in Wadi Faynan. The sequence
extends from c. 2500 years ago (far right) to the present day (left).
– perhaps the very high levels of late Roman/Byzantine pottery and other settlement
debris strewn over the Želds indicate increasingly desperate attempts to maintain soil
fertility by intensive manuring, though in fact this simply served to carry metallurgical
slags and associated pollution further out into the Želds. The inescapable conclusion is
that Roman and Byzantine industrial activity and its associated agricultural support
system created the degraded landscapes of the modern Wadi Faynan desert. There are in
fact still high levels of pollution in the modern fauna and ora living on and around the
ancient settlements, resulting in high levels of copper traces, for example, in the dung,
urine and milk of the Bedouin ocks (Gilbertson et al. 1999; Pyatt et al. 1999). With this
evidence that Roman-period pollutants are still getting into the food chain, work is in
progress to assess the levels of heavy metal pollutants in human skeletal remains from a
Roman/Byzantine cemetery near Khirbet Faynan, the expectation being that metallurgical pollution is likely to have had major effects on the health of the Roman workforce
from inhalation, skin contamination and bioaccumulation from animal and plant foods.
Conclusion
The Tripolitanian pre-desert in Libya and the Wadi Faynan in Jordan were both marginal
landscapes on the fringe of the Roman empire, the former in Roman Africa and the latter
in Roman Arabia. Both were transformed by systems of oodwater farming through the
centuries of Roman imperialism, in climatic contexts fundamentally the same as today.
A tale of two deserts
503
But here, as case studies in desert settlement and their implications for understanding
desertiŽcation processes, the comparisons cease.
In Tripolitania, systems of sedentary settlement and intensive land use involving cash
crop farming developed rapidly, probably within a century, as indigenous élites took
advantage of new opportunities offered by urban settlement growth on the coastal littoral
and the supply needs of local Roman garrisons. In the Wadi Faynan, equally remarkable
systems of sedentary settlement and land use were at their zenith in the centuries of
Roman power, but in this case they represented the climax of a sequence of increasingly
sophisticated systems of oodwater farming that began in the Early Bronze Age. From
the third or fourth centuries AD onwards the Tripolitanian pre-desert farming systems
gradually reverted to extensive pastoral-dominated systems of land use, and in a piecemeal way, with more favoured localities in the northern sector continuing to sustain sedentary settlement supported by irrigation farming to recent times; whereas in the Wadi
Faynan the elaborate systems of water control, and the substantial settlements sustained
by them, seem to have been almost wholly abandoned in the Byzantine period. In the
Tripolitanian pre-desert we found no signiŽcant evidence for humanly induced environmental degradation, and indeed several indicators of attempts by the Romano-Libyan
farmers to practise sustainable systems of land management, whereas in the Wadi Faynan
there is abundant evidence of catastrophic degradation resulting from the contemporary
activities of miners and farmers. These two frontier regions display remarkably contrasting trajectories of landscape transformation within the same context of Roman imperialism, characterized by both wise and foolish decisions, and by both activities which had
minor impacts from which the landscape recovered and activities with devastating impacts
both on the people who were responsible for them but also on generations to come.
It must also be emphasized that these differing trajectories cannot be assumed to be
region-wide – other arid regions in Roman Africa and Roman Arabia undoubtedly have
other desertiŽcation histories, and there are certainly no simple correlations between
climatic change and human responses in terms of dryland settlement. Thus there is clear
evidence in coastal North Africa, for example in Tunisia and Libya, for massive alluviation during the centuries of the Roman empire, with dams and aqueducts being overwhelmed by alluvial sediments (Ballais 2000; Vita-Finzi 1960, 1969). This was caused
mainly by agricultural exploitation, which was certainly very intensive in many regions –
olive farming in the hills behind Lepcis Magna was on an industrial scale, for example
(Mattingly 1996) – though the deleterious effects of this land use were probably exacerbated by a climatic shift to wetter weather. In Israel, coastal molluscan sequences (Geyh
1994), terrace formation in the Negev desert (Goldberg 1994) and higher Dead Sea water
levels (Frumkin et al. 1994) have all been cited as evidence for a wetter climate in the
Levant (or at least the regions more exposed to Mediterranean weather patterns) in the
Žrst two centuries AD, yet in the Negev oodwater farming systems seem to have been on
a very small scale at this time compared with, for example, those of the Tripolitanian predesert (Rosen 2000). The peak of desert farming in the Negev was in fact in the Byzantine period, which was certainly arid, and signiŽcant agricultural activity continued well
beyond the abandonment of the Byzantine cities at least until the ninth or tenth centuries,
and the Žnal abandonment of the central Negev took place at a time of climatic amelioration, not aridiŽcation (Rosen 2000).
504 Graeme Barker
Modern desertiŽcation theory can learn a great deal from the archaeological record of
the desert margins of the Roman empire in North Africa and the Near East. There was
no simple evolutionary development from simple to complex or extensive to intensive
systems of oodwater farming, and there were no straightforward correlations between
particular human activities and particular environmental impacts. The two case studies
emphasize above all the complexity of ancient societies’ perceptions of these marginal and
precarious environments, of their responses to the constraints and opportunities
presented to them, and of the manner in which their activities impacted on the landscape.
Here as elsewhere, dryland agricultural and pastoral histories were ‘formed and changed
within speciŽc place-bound, social, historical, and ecological contexts’ (Widgren 2000:
262). In terms of the different degradation histories summarized in this paper, though,
perhaps two general, though no doubt simplistic, observations can be made: the ecological sustainability of the oodwater farming in the Tripolitanian pre-desert was rooted in
bottom-up decision making, with the wall systems demonstrating detailed local knowledge of landscape and water ow, whereas in the Wadi Faynan the extraordinary but
short-lived and erosive agricultural system created by Roman farmers was established
largely within the context of imperial power, imposed control and top-down decision
making. These Žndings certainly resonate strongly with the experience of development
agencies working with dryland farmers today (Lean 1994; Mortimore 1998).
Acknowledgements
I should like to acknowledge the support of the many funding bodies that Žnanced the
Želdwork and laboratory studies of the two main case studies cited in this paper: for the
UNESCO Libyan Valleys Survey, notably the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust,
the Society for Libyan Studies, UNESCO and the Universities of Leicester, Manchester
and ShefŽeld; and for the Wadi Faynan Landscape Survey notably the Arts and Humanities Research Board, the British Academy, the British Institute at Amman for Archaeology and History (now part of the Council for British Research in Levant), the
Humanities Research Board, the Society of Antiquaries and the Universities of Aberystwyth and Leicester. The paper draws on the research of the many scholars in the two
projects, but in particular on the work of Russ Adams, John Dore, Crispin Flower, David
Gilbertson, Annie Grant, John Grattan, Chris Hunt, the late Barri Jones, David
Mattingly, Hwedi Mohammed, Paul Newson, Brian Pyatt, Tim Reynolds, Roberta
Tomber and Marijke van der Veen. I am particularly grateful to Paul Newson for supplying a GIS map of pottery distributions in the Wadi Faynan Želd system (Fig. 5).
School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester, Leicester LE1
7RH, UK
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