Different emphases on ideological, socio-economic and technological changes have been brought to bear on the cultural variability made materially manifest in pre-Iron Age Saharan pastoral societies. The models have ranged from limited or no complexity before iron production to transient mobile elites across the Sahara, to socially complex communities from the mid-Holocene onwards in the Central Libyan Sahara, and to permanent elites with complex social structures. Here, ethnographic cultural variability is stressed, previous models detailed, and data for the Eastern and Central Sahara summarised and analysed. The emerging picture is of a mosaic of population movements, clustering and experimentation resulting in transient peaks of wealth and the potential for incipient social complexity to become temporarily or permanently manifest. Saharan social diversity serves as a warning against linear models and highlights the importance of an explanatory framework for investigating the evolution of social structures outside of permanently settled communities for North Africa.

对意识形态，社会经济和技术变革的不同重视已影响到铁器时代之前撒哈拉沙漠牧民社会中实质性体现的文化变异性。这些模型的范围从制铁之前的有限或没有复杂性，撒哈拉以南地区的短暂流动精英，从利比亚撒哈拉中部全新世中期开始的社会复杂社区，以及具有复杂社会结构的永久精英。在这里，强调了人种学的文化变异性，详细介绍了先前的模型，并对东部和中部撒哈拉沙漠地区的数据进行了总结和分析。新兴的图景是人口流动，聚类和实验的结合体，导致财富短暂达到顶峰，初期的社会复杂性有可能暂时或永久地显现出来。