Caravan Routes as Windows to the Past: How Mobility Produces Landscapes in the Horn of Africa (The Afar Salt Trail, Ethiopia)

Caravan routes have traditionally been treated as lines linking analytically significant endpoints. This review article argues instead that organized caravan mobility is itself a force in landscape production, a capacity undertheorized in archaeology of ancient trade. I propose a three-part analytic distinguishing the material dimension (settlements, campsites, and trails generated by logistical demand), the social dimension (institutions forged by structured interdependence), and the ecological dimension (distributed knowledge rendering hostile terrain navigable). The argument draws on over a decade of ethnoarchaeological and archaeological research on the Afar salt caravan route of northern Ethiopia, one of the last active pack-animal caravan systems, addressing the near-absence of the Horn of Africa from the landscapes-of-movement literature and engaging comparatively with systems in Egypt, the South-Central Andes, Tanzania, Central Asia, and the Sahara. As such systems disappear, ethnoarchaeological documentation becomes an urgent heritage practice and a foundation for reorienting trade-route archaeology around mobility itself.