DMP IX: Summary Report on the Fourth Season of Excavations of the Burials and Identity team

Abstract

The fourth season of the Burials and Identity component of the Desert Migrations Project in 2010 focused on completion of excavation work at two main cemeteries (TAG001 and TAG012) and smaller-scale sampling work at a number of nearby cemeteries. The investigation of a number of burials in a semi-nucleated escarpment cemetery TAG063 produced interesting new information on Proto-Urban Garamantian funerary rites, dating to the latter centuries bc. The excavations at TAG001 were extended to two areas of the cemetery characterised by different burial types to the stepped tombs that were excavated in 2009. A second type of fairly monumental burial was identified, but these had been heavily robbed and it was not possible to demonstrate conclusively that these pre-dated the stepped tombs. Most of the other burials excavated were simple shaft burials and were relatively sparsely furnished with imported goods, in comparison with the larger tombs, though quite a lot of organic material was identified (matting, wood, gourds, textiles and leather). At TAG012, a series of additional mudbrick tombs was emptied. All had been robbed, but pockets of the original fill and associated finds survived intact, yielding some interesting assemblages. The majority of these tombs appear to be Late Garamantian, though some contained artefacts from much earlier times.

Persistent deathplaces and mobile landmarks: The Holocene mortuary and isotopic record from Wadi Takarkori (SW Libya)

“…Megalithic architecture and the practice of placing the dead under heaps of stones -sometimes of articulated shape and monumental size -lasted for millennia (di Lernia et al, 2002;di Lernia and Merighi, 2006). Another major shift is recorded approximately 3000 BP: highly formalized architecture (drum-type), increased density (burial fields of several hundred tombs) and grave goods (including exotic items and prestige objects) testify of a deep reorganization of Final Pastoral society, eventually leading to the rise of the Garamantian state Biagetti and di Lernia, 2008;Mattingly et al, 2010).…”

“…In the Sahara, such monuments were likely used as territorial markers (e.g., di Lernia et al, 2002;Mattingly et al, 2010;Lane, in press) when competition for food resources started to arise. The deteriorating environment might have prompted an intensified mobility of the pastoral groups, which is mirrored in the heterogeneous origin -clearly reflected in the Sr ratio -of these people but also a change in food strategies, possibly indicated by the C and N data.…”

Activity patterns in the Sahara Desert: An interpretation based on cross‐sectional geometric properties

“…The date of the material spanned the entire Garamantian period, from the Early to the Late phase, and was excavated at several sites around Garama since the 1950s. Specifically, some of the material was excavated by a Sudanese archaeologist, Mohammed Ayoub (1968a,b), but was very poorly recorded, while the bulk of the skeletons under study came from a number of excavations conducted by Charles Daniels (Daniels, 1989;Nikita et al, 2010) and by the Desert Migrations Project (Mattingly et al, 2008(Mattingly et al, , 2009(Mattingly et al, , 2010.…”