Libyan landscapes in history and prehistory

AbstractAs a contribution to the Society for Libyan Studies’ 50th anniversary, the paper discusses three projects in which the author has been involved, with a focus on their different contributions to our understanding of Libya's landscape prehistory and history. The deep stratigraphy of the Haua Fteah cave in three projects are described in chronological order, but they contribute in reverse order to our understanding of how Libyans have changed and been changed by their landscapes. The deep stratigraphy of the Haua Fteah cave in Cyrenaica represents an intermittent history of landscape use, and the way people dealt with climate change impacts, from some 150,000 years ago to the Graeco-Roman period. The faunal assemblage from Sidi Khrebish, Benghazi, provides insights into how Graeco-Roman city-dwellers interacted with the people of the countryside. The UNESCO Libyan Valleys Survey changes the perspective, showing how tribal people in the pre-desert were drawn into the ambit of the coastal cities and the economy of imperial Rome, before returning to semi-mobile pastoral/arable lifeways not so dissimilar to the lives of many Libyans before the oil revolution. The principal linking finding is that there are no simple stories from the past in terms of people's relations to their landscape: the mix of structure and agency embodied in the archaeological record can be a record of failures, misguided decisions, bad luck etc. as much as of successful responses and adaptations to opportunities and challenges.