Farmers and frontiers: exploiting and defending the countryside of Roman Tripolitania

The most controversial aspects of Richard Goodchild’s pioneering work on the ‘limes Tripolitanus’, forty years after its original publication in 1949 and 1950, concern the date of the development of a frontier in Tripolitania (northwest Libya) and the interpretation of the fortified farms which are so characteristic of the zone. Elements of Goodchild’s ‘limitanei’ theory, viz. that the farms were the result of a deliberate Roman policy of colonizing the land with soldier farmers, are still entrenched in the literature, but there now exist several attempts to summarize the newer evidence and to amend the traditional picture. The author examines the way in which publications from the last twenty years deal with these issues, as well as with other areas of debate, such as the economic basis of the region’s wealth (trans-Saharan trade versus extensive agricultural exploitation, particularly in the form of oleoculture), the farming practices of the predesert communities, and the cultural character of the region. Bibliogr.