Authors

Mario Liverani (“Salt from the Garamantes”) is director of antiquities research at the University of Rome. Shown here with the geo-archaeologist Mauro Cremaschi, Liverani heads excavations in Italy, the Near East and Libya. He is widely known for his numerous writings on the ancient Near East—especially Bronze Age Mesopotamia and Syria-Palestine—and he is editor of Akkad: The First World Empire: Structure, Ideology, Traditions (Padova, Italy: Sargon Press, 1993).

When not fieldwalking the Sahara, David Mattingly (“Making the Desert Bloom”) is a professor of Roman archaeology at the University of Leicester, England. Besides his work on the Garamantes, Mattingly is collaborating on the Wadi Faynan project, which investigates a Roman imperial copper mine in Jordan. He is co-author of UNESCO’s Libyan Valleys Survey and author of Tripolitania (Univ. of Michigan, 1994), a history of western Libya.