David Mattingly
speaker
188 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 11 Jun
David Mattingly’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, we've heard that there were hundreds of thousands of Garamantean burials known, but up to the 1990s, there were very few settlement sites that had been identified.
And in a way, this played into the older view that the Garamantes must be nomadic because we had all these burials and nowhere for them to live.
Well, subsequently, the survey work that we and others have done, there was an earlier British archaeologist called Charles Daniels who did some pioneering work
We've now started to identify in vast numbers the settlement sites that go with those cemeteries.
In the early Garamantean period, that's round about 1000 BCE, they're living in effectively what are hill forts, fortified sites up on the escarpment that marks the southern edge of the valley.
From about 400 BCE, they seem to move down en masse into the plain, the centre of this valley where the oasis grows.
And there they're living in open village settlements, which they constructed in mud brick.
But the houses there, they're multi-roomed, rectilinear, quite complex architecture.
At Garama, the Garamantian capital, we get some even more sophisticated aspects, including stone architecture for some monumental buildings.
And then from about 300 CE, we see increasingly the introduction of defensive architecture at their settlement sites, with the appearance of castle-like buildings.
buildings with projecting towers on their outer walls.
So a very different sort of picture emerged about the nature of Garamantian society.
And from the beginning, it's clearly tied to the oasis cultivation.
Well, I think it's important to understand the sort of conventions in which Greek and Roman sources wrote about peoples on the periphery or beyond the periphery of the Mediterranean world.
And I have an idea which I call progressive barbarisation.
And that is, you know, that Mediterranean peoples, Greek and Roman...
took a very Mediterranean-centric view of the world in which everything about the Mediterranean was civilised and everything that lay beyond was very primitive.
And it's a deliberately schematic way of looking at the world.
So Greek and Roman sources, when they write about these neighbouring peoples, they're not writing in an anthropological or ethnographic way.
They're, as much as anything, bringing out these sort of stereotypes
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