ACCELERATING CULTURAL CHANGE INDUCED BY AN EMERGING AND EXPANDING TRILOBITE ECONOMY IN SOUTHERN MOROCCO

Over the past several decades spectacular black calcareous trilobites, meticulously prepared to display their high quality of preservation, have brought a substantial and increasing cash flow into a previously low-level subsistence economy in the trans-Atlas region of southern Morocco.

South of the valley of the Dades River gently folded early Paleozoic strata are excellently exposed in the eastern Anti-Atlas Mountains and many zones contain abundant trilobite fauna. Motivated in part by increasing paleotourism contacts, innumerable Bedouin men have hand excavated many tens of kilometers of shallow trenches across the desert floor and along cliffsides following productive horizons in their search for trilobites.

Once discovered, rocks containing trilobite material are taken to various home workshops and labs to be prepared for sale to wholesalers and collectors. Collaboration with professional paleontologists is generally welcomed and new species are frequently found.

A major location for trilobite quarrying lies in the eastern Anti-Atlas, south of the highway between Alnif and Erfoud. Dozens of retail trilobite shops can be found in both of these towns and at isolated shops along the highway between them.

While many world-class, museum quality specimens are recovered, there is also much inferior quality material that is eventually composited or otherwise "enhanced" and then sold off to unsuspecting intermediaries. A substantial sub-industry in replica trilobites has also developed; good-looking trilobite casts can be turned out in less than 30 minutes by skillful craftsmen using only primitive methods.

Many participants in the discovery, preparation, and sales of both authentic and replica trilobites still live in primitive housing with minimal modern conveniences. But recently constructed good roads and an ever-increasing foreign interest in these materials has injected enough cash into the local economy that satellite TV and cell phones are becoming ubiquitous in what is otherwise still a very conservative part of the world. The burgeoning trilobite trade is thus enabling a large population younger Moroccans to have direct, real-time observation of world events and foreign cultures in what was until less than two decades ago an isolated backwater in northwest Africa.