06 · INTENSIVE AGRICULTURE · MAINTENANCE

When the water arrives

How water was distributed among the fields

The water emerging from the tunnels had to be distributed by channels and irrigation turns.

Museum documentation · free public access, no account required.

Specific historical reconstruction of From the tunnel to a grid of fields, Fezzan, I millennium BCE–I millennium CE — **DECLARED VISUAL RECONSTRUCTION · AI-GENERATED IMAGE · TRACEKEEPERS**
Generated reconstruction · Declared visual hypothesis
Declared visual reconstruction, created for museographic contextualisation; not a photograph of the original nor does it constitute documentary evidence.

History and context

Outlet channels and parcels distributed the flow towards oasis crops. Cleaning galleries and negotiating turns turned maintenance into a daily institution.

Inequality may have been important, but not every foggara can automatically be attributed to slaves from a single ancient phrase.

Gallery outlets fed channels and parcels; the hydraulic system only makes sense alongside cultivated soil. Relict traces allow mapping that relationship.

About one hundred square kilometres of fields have been recognised in the regional synthesis. Turn rules, ownership and coercion changed and cannot be read directly from the plan.

Evidence and interpretation

Relict fields, channels and their relationship with foggaras are mapped. Social rules and coercion must be studied in context.

Catalogue facts

Narrative date: I millennium BCE–I millennium CE
Location: Fezzan
Material: Channels, agricultural soils and water
Context: Productive landscape
Curatorial reading: The documented fact and its interpretation appear separately in the evidence block.
Relict fields: Approximately 100 km² mapped
Recurring work: Gallery cleaning and flow distribution
Documentary coverage: 2 museum, heritage, primary corpus or research sources for this stop.

A closer look

About 1 min to read · 1 section. Further reading and sources · free access. Editorial review recorded: September 5, 2026.

Two growing seasons

The plant remains from Jarma indicate that, from the end of the first millennium BCE, crops associated with both winter and summer were cultivated. The research distinguishes cereals, fruit trees and fibre crops. This combination adds a temporal dimension to the layout of the plots: maintaining an oasis involved activities distributed throughout the year, with different cropping calendars. The hydraulic infrastructure made it possible to sustain this intensive agricultural regime. The recovered seeds help reconstruct the succession of tasks that a field drawn on a map cannot show.

Research · Ruth Pelling · Garamantian agriculture: the plant remains from Jarma, Fazzan (2008)Access recorded: September 5, 2026.

Sources and references

Expand this information and consult its sources

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