Heiko Riemer
Caravan Archaeologies Workshop/Taller de Caravanas Arqueológicas
Desert road archaeology in the eastern Sahara and the survey of ancient navigation
Topics: Sahara, caravan, desert road, donkey, camel, remote sensing, navigation
Although recent archaeological work in and around the Egyptian oases have tremendously upgraded our understanding of long-distance trade connections from the Nile Valley to the oases and into Saharan and sub-Saharan regions, most of the evidence gained is still indirect concerning the way how people travelled, and information and commodities were exchanged – and on which routes this took place. Field projects on the so-called Abu Ballas Trail between 1999 and 2006 and on the Darb el-Tawil since 2016 have started to fill this gap. They provided evidence that much of the road network dates back to the earliest colonization of the oases by the pharaonic state during the 3rd millennium BCE.
They also convinced us that survey and interpretation of ancient desert roads is a neglected but promising field of research with its own conceptual categories and perspectives. On the one hand, this understanding resulted from the experience that desert roads are not discrete archaeological sites, but rather complex linear structures and frameworks of well-provisioned long-distance mobility embedded into specific desert landscapes which would challenge common conceptual categories and methods in archaeology. On the other hand, it was realized that other disciplines, such as geography and cultural anthropology, may significantly contribute to the establishment of new research concepts, ranging from participation in field research to aims and models of interpretation.
The main objectives of approaches in “Desert Road Archaeology” have already been outlined (Riemer and Forster 2013), of which only some central points are touched on here. First, the bundles of animal tracks formed in the desert surface can be traced by means of remote sensing and field reconnaissance. This is an important method to establish adequate maps of the road network, and to understand which centres were connected. Secondly, the introduction of the donkey as beast of burden and the much later change to the camel as the ‘ship of the desert’ mark two important turning points when this kind of technical innovations have largely improved travel distances and transport capacities. Thirdly, pottery lost or intentionally deposited are the most frequent artefacts to be found along the roads. In turn, pottery enables to date travel activities, thus forming an important statistical archive to reconstruct changes of economic and geopolitical interests. Finally, many roads have systematically been waymarked by stone cairns. The study of this guiding system and the general role navigation and landscape perception played along the desert roads will be deepened in the current paper.
Many roads through the Sahara are waymarked by simple stone cairns visible from afar. They are placed along the routes to act as artificial landmarks following the concept of the guide-cairn. Although often arbitrary erected at significant positions along the road, many roads are systematically waymarked at intervals to safely direct the travellers during the entire journey. Opposed to cognitive mapping in a natural landscape, the installation of visible road markers involved the introduction of a completely new traffic concept. Pharaonic Egypt started to organise a travel network by modifying the natural landscape by means of this uniform road marker system. Having gathered experience with cairn navigation, a Pharaonic caravan leader was probably able to go along a waymarked road that he had never travelled along before. Thus, the pharaonic roads show early features of route formalisation and in its final consequence led to a hitherto unknown efficiency and an administrative organisation of travel and transport across desert regions.