It has been over a decade since Horden and Purcell – remarking on the broad analytical potential of the connectivity of their Corrupting Sea (2000) to usher in a ‘new thalassology’ – suggested we expand this connectivity not only to other bodies of water but even to ‘virtual seas … spaces of danger and variable communications – mountain ranges, forests, or arid wildernesses such as the Sahara’ (P. Horden and N. Purcell, AHR 111 [2006], 723, emphasis added). The European Research Council-funded Trans-SAHARA Project at the University of Leicester eschews ‘a coherent and fully networked unity’ for the Sahara as we might expect in the Mediterranean Sea (p. 4). Yet the project does embrace the desert as a valid geographical frame of study and places it at the core of a five-year programme that explores the interconnectedness of the Sahara across the pre-Islamic period through a series of conferences, workshops and dedicated research groups. The current volume is the first of four planned for the project, all emerging out of a series of thematic conferences hosted in 2014 and 2015. Future contributions will include similar volumes on urbanisation and state formation, mobile technologies, and human mobility and identity.

The introduction by Mattingly does an excellent job in summarising the status quaestionis of trade in the pre-Islamic Sahara; the author's extensive work on the Garamantes of the Fazzan uniquely recommends him for such a task. The chapter serves not only as an outline of the volume's contents but also as an overview of Roman, Saharan and Sub-Saharan trade connections, the climatic and hydrological conditions facilitating movement, and the commodities of trade. The rest of the volume comprises fourteen chapters and a concluding discussion, divided into three parts: ‘Connectivity and Networks’, ‘Trade in Organic Materials’ and ‘Trade in Inorganic Materials’. It is not possible to give each chapter adequate coverage here. The following discussion, therefore, focuses on those contributions or ideas that struck this reader the most, specifically those that brought together frequently overlooked strands of evidence or generated new questions or avenues for future research.

Part 1 covers a wide range of material and also offers some of the most unexpectedly thought-provoking comparisons of the volume. J. Scheele's chapter, ‘The Need for Nomads’, relies on modern ethnographic examples and archival accounts, largely from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to stress the centrality of nomadic pastoralists to any Saharan trade systems. Putting aside entirely justified concerns with retroactively inserting the Early Modern Tuareg into the Garamantian past (see Mattingly, p. 32), Scheele nonetheless poses fresh queries on the nature of pastoral/sedentary interactions in the pre-Islamic period. Chapters by A. Haour, ‘What Made Islamic Trade Distinctive, as Compared to Pre-Islamic Trade?’, M. Cissé, ‘The Trans-Saharan Trade Connection with Gao (Mali)’ and M. Horton and colleagues, ‘An Indian Ocean Perspective on Trans-Saharan Trading Systems’, all do a good job in situating both chronologically and geographically the predominantly Mediterranean-facing archaeological materials, adeptly summarised by A. Wilson, in ‘Saharan Exports to the Roman World’, that form the bulk of the sections to follow. An observation by Horton and colleagues on the conceptual similarities between camels and ships (pp. 147–9), at least for Swahili traders themselves, also acts as a form of justification for future wide-reaching study of the parallels between camel-driven Saharan trade and the maritime networks intersecting with these trans-continental land routes.

Part 2, ‘Trade in Organic Materials’, re-emphasises the importance of organic commodities both by volume and trade value, despite the lesser rates of archaeological survival of these remains. The title of this part is, at first glance, slightly deceiving given that the contents speak almost exclusively to the trade in textiles rather than organic materials more widely. That the three chapters in this section focus so heavily on textile remains is not to suggest, however, that the scope of these essays is at all limited; taken collectively, they provide some of the most tantalising glimpses into the exchange of not only goods but also social contacts and ideas. The introduction to the section by Mattingly and Cole, ‘The Significance of Organic Materials in Saharan Trade’, dissects nineteenth-century accounts of European travellers to justify the use of textiles as an exemplar of the trade in organic goods. The authors then present new evidence for textile production at Garamantian sites through the analysis of burial shrouds recovered at the Watwat and Zinkekra cemeteries. The Garamantian materials raise fascinating questions about the practices of textile trade and manufacture, particularly surrounding the use of S-spun yarns for the body of most shrouds, broadly consistent with Egyptian manufacture, and Z-spun yarns for embellishment or decorative edgings on these same garments, as is the preference in the limited evidence for Saharan and Sub-Saharan textiles (pp. 224–6). The significance of these different techniques of making textiles is further elaborated by L. Bender Jørgensen in ‘Textiles and Textile Trade in the First Millennium ad: Evidence from Egypt’, a chapter that covers, amongst other aspects of weaving and production, the use of yarn twist as a determinant of provenance (pp. 237–9). S. Guédon concludes the section with a joint study of epigraphic and archaeological materials for textile circulation that makes a novel observation about the function of the identity of the traders themselves in understanding Roman legal viewpoints on foreign goods (pp. 265–6).

Part 3, ‘Trade in Inorganic Materials’, touches upon some of the archaeological markers we might more often associate with long-distance networks, namely ceramics, glass, metals and beads. Chapters by M. Bonifay, ‘Pottery and Amphora “Import Substitution” in Inland Regions of Roman Africa?’, and A. Leone, ‘Pottery and Trade in North and Sub-Saharan Africa during Late Antiquity’, as well as half of the coverage of the section's introduction by Leitch and colleagues, ‘Early Saharan Trade: the Inorganic Evidence’, all substantially reinforce our growing understanding of the volume and frequency of trade between the Roman Mediterranean and the Garamantes and other Saharan communities. The latter contribution goes further still to put forward bead-working and metallurgy, alongside the textile manufacture of the previous part, as three Garamantian industries both consumed locally and exported further afield (Leitch et al., p. 333). It is in this section, also, that the latest techniques in archaeological science come to the fore as a means of tracing the origins of excavated materials. L. Dussubieux, in ‘Glass Beads in Trans-Saharan Trade’, presents an overview of recent trace element analysis of the glass beads from Sub-Saharan Africa; the results provide a helpful summary of various glass types. The contribution by S. Nixon, ‘Trans-Saharan Gold Trade in Pre-Modern Times’, might have found a more natural fit in this section – given both its coverage of inorganic material and its reliance on assorted scientific techniques – rather than in Part 1. Yet it is an investigation of the earliest dated Sub-Saharan glass in the chapter by S. Magnavita, ‘Archaeometric Approaches to the Study of Early Trans-Saharan Trade’, that presents perhaps the most unexpected observation, namely a Middle Eastern or Central Asian origin for the bulk of the first Sub-Saharan glass objects (pp. 398–403); this is in direct contrast to the glass recorded amongst the Garamantes, which fits more easily into a typical Roman compositional profile (Leitch et al., p. 309). Trans-Saharan trade, therefore, was not only interacting with Mediterranean networks to the north but also connecting to the Silk Roads and Indian Ocean systems to the east.

The volume ends with a short conclusion by the editors that outlines key arguments for the various materials discussed throughout, calls for ongoing remote mapping of archaeological sites and suggests more scientific provenance studies (coupled with continued cautious and nuanced interpretation) such as those introduced here (Mattingly et al., p. 434).

It is not, of course, that textiles, pots or beads moved on their own accord across great expanses of desert. A perhaps unintended consequence of the wider thematic structure of the Trans-SAHARA Project itself is that the focus on regional trade and, especially, materials in the present volume could become divorced from the movement of people and ideas that will be featured elsewhere. It is to the credit of the authors that the work nonetheless contains aspects of the social networks and daily practices at the heart of any trade system: the system of inscribed graffiti used by traders to group ceramics for specific markets (Leitch et al., pp. 298–9); the interpersonal networks of trust maintained across a diasporic community that facilitated long-distance contacts (Haour, pp. 93–4); the invisible exports and guide services provided by the Garamantes as Saharan middle-men (Wilson, p. 203), to give only three examples. The only real lacuna is the lack of a dedicated contribution discussing the trade in enslaved peoples within these wider economic systems. Wilson correctly touches upon the role of slavery in the Garamantian economy, ranging from raids on their immediate neighbours (the Tebu) to possible human trade or additional raiding far to the south, perhaps as far as today's Niger and Lake Chad (pp. 192–3). Mattingly further stresses the profitable nature of enslaved labour, both as a commodity in Garamantian trade with the Mediterranean world and as a necessary feature of the foggara irrigation systems that characterise agriculture in the region (pp. 27–8). While both chapters mention in passing the difficulty in understanding the sparse archaeological and historical evidence, the volume would nonetheless have benefited from an attempt to synthesise these materials. Even the tri-partite structure of the work – connectivity, organic goods, inorganic goods – seems to have no space for the institution of slavery within these wider concerns. If, as Mattingly suggests, ‘slaves were potentially one of the most lucrative commodities available to the Garamantes’ (p. 27), this is an area that should be central to any future research.

The volume is well-edited, and colour figures are used most effectively in the presentation of the various categories of materials. Issues in symbology for distribution maps of the Garamantian region unfortunately impact their overall effectiveness (figs 1.5, 11.21–2, 11.24–6). The use of a very ephemeral lineweight for foggaras and some site markers makes these almost entirely indistinguishable either in print or online, and the distinction between ‘settlements’ and ‘settlement’ or ‘cemetery’ and ‘cemeteries’ as legend items on a single map was not obvious (fig 11.24).

These production critiques, however, are relatively minor given the expansive scope and strength of the overall contributions of the volume. The Trans-SAHARA Project has confidently set a new scholarly agenda for the desert in pre-Islamic times. The Sahara is not solely the space of danger and arid wilderness described by Horden and Purcell above, but also a landscape of opportunity (after D. Mattingly, JRA Supp. 23 [1997]) – not only from the Islamic period, as is more conventionally accepted, but also in antiquity. I look forward to the further volumes under the Project's mandate, and also to the future unexpected research avenues facilitated by this long-overdue shift in focus.