The ancient Sahara has often been treated as a periphery or barrier, but this agenda-setting book – the final volume of the Trans-Saharan Archaeology Series – demonstrates that it was teeming with technological innovations, knowledge transfer, and trade from long before the Islamic period. In each chapter, expert authors present important syntheses, and new evidence for technologies from oasis farming and irrigation, animal husbandry and textile weaving, to pottery, glass and metal making by groups inhabiting the Sahara and contiguous zones. Scientific analysis is brought together with anthropology and archaeology. The resultant picture of transformations in technologies between the third millennium BC and the second millennium AD is rich and detailed, including analysis of the relationship between the different materials and techniques discussed, and demonstrating the significance of the Sahara both in its own right and in telling the stories of neighbouring regions.

CHLOE N. DUCKWORTH is a Lecturer in Archaeological Materials Science at Newcastle University, specialising in the archaeology of technology, and particularly in the multidisciplinary investigation of ancient and medieval glasses, from experimental reconstruction of furnaces and glass objects, to the use of historical texts, to chemical and stylistic analysis. AURÉLIE CUÉNOD is an Honorary Visiting Fellow at the University of Leicester. Her research has focused on metal production and trade in the Pre-Islamic Sahara. She has in particular studied the metalworking evidence from Fazzan in Libya as a member of the Trans-SAHARA Project and participated to field and laboratory research on the metals of southern Morocco for the Middle Draa Project. DAVID J. MATTINGLY is Professor of Roman Archaeology at the University of Leicester. He has worked in the Sahara for forty years and is the author of many books and articles related to Saharan archaeology, such as Farming the Desert (2 vols, 1996), which won the James R. Wiseman book award of the American Institute of Archaeology, and The Archaeology of Fazzan series (4 vols, 2003–2013). He was the principal investigator of the European Research Council-funded Trans-SAHARA Project (2011–2017) which created the groundwork for this volume, and he is the overall series editor of Trans-Saharan Archaeology, in which this is the final instalment of four volumes.