Green Saharas, Grey Markets: Commercial Exploitation of North African Prehistory, an Overview

In a number of countries, the collecting of archaeological artefacts is regarded as a valid manner of public engagement with the past and has experienced an explosive growth in the last fifty years. This is due to two factors: the spread in the 1970s of the use of metal detectors for hobby artefact hunting, and then in the mid 1990s internet trading changed the face of the antiquities market and placed the commerce in archaeological artefacts at the reach of everybody. This in turn is currently deeply affecting public perceptions of archaeology in those countries. Thousands of people, in Europe and North America in particular, engage in collecting either through artefact hunting on local sites, while others acquire objects through purchase, driving a growing international antiquities market. This paper attempts to explore some of the wider material consequences of this general phenomenon, focusing on the collection of and commerce in prehistoric lithic material from the Sahara region. Part of it is framed around a detailed search in 2019 of the major internet portals handling this type of material. Popular interest in the indigenous cultures of the Sahara was a legacy of European colonialism and a growing interest (from about the mid 1950s) in western societies in owning and collecting “ethnic” and “tribal art” (Graburn ed. 1977: 315; Corbey 2000) associated with an idyllic sentimentalist vision of the bon sauvage living in harmony with nature. Imaginations were fired in the 1950s and 1960s by the discoveries and popular publications of Henri Lhote (e.g., 1958) about the prehistory of the desert regions of North Africa. The enigmatic rock art he described appealed to modern aesthetics as well as New Agers; the whole issue of a primordial “Green Sahara” raised questions that resonated with environmentalists. These factors encouraged the growth of a market for collectables from this region. In the 1960s to 1980s, trade in antiquities and ethnographic objects was in the hands of knowledgeable and experienced specialist dealers with brick-and-mortar “galleries”, high overheads, and limited clientele (e.g., Ede 1976). This dictated the quality, nature and cost