Human-plant relationships in the Garamantian culture (Fezzan, Libya, Central Sahara)

This paper reports archaeobotanical data which can help understand the relationships between humans and plants in Garamantian times in Fezzan. This region of the Central Sahara was inhabited by a sedentary population, the Garamantes, who exploited wells in the oasis and developed a network of sites controlling the Saharan caravan routes, as attested by archaeological and epigraphic sources since halfway through the 1st millennium BC. The research on pollen and plant macrofossils has been carried out from a multidisciplinary perspective on Garamantian settlements belonging to different occupational phases. Phoenix dactilyfera and Hordeum vulgare are the best represented plants in the archaeobotanical record, together with other fruits such as grapes and figs. Therefore, palms and cereals would have been the most characteristic crops cultivated by the Garamantes, and markers of the Fezzan landscape at that time. Plants were planted in the oasis, along channels and in gardens, or imported by trade and exchanges. It emerges that the Garamantes knew the limits and potentialities of the environment they inhabited, which was already in its current hyperarid climatic phase.