Suchergebnisse

This book focuses on the issues of resilience and variability of desert pastoralists, explicitly challenging a set of traditional topics of the discourse around pastoralism in arid lands of the Old World. Based on a field research carried out on the Kel Tadrart Tuareg in Libya, various facets of a surprisingly successful adaptation to an extremely arid environment are investigated. By means of an ethnoarchaeological approach, explored are the Kel Tadrart interactions with natural resources, the settlement patterns, the campsite structures, and the formation of the pastoral archaeological landscape, focusing on variability and its causes. The resilience of the Kel Tadrart is the key to understand the reasons of their choice to stay and live in the almost rainless Acacus Mountains, in spite of strong pressure to sedentarize in the neighboring oases. Through the collection of the interviews, participant observation, mapping of inhabited and abandoned campsites, remote sensing, and archival sources, various and different Kel Tadrart strategies, perceptions, and material cultures are examined. This book fills an important gap in the ethnoarchaeological research in central Sahara and in the study of desert pastoralism. Desert lands are likely to increase over the next decades but, our knowledge of human adaptations to these areas of the world is still patchy and generally biased by the idea that extremely arid lands are not suited for human occupation

Rainfed cultivation in drylands, especially arid and hyper-arid lands, is often considered to play a minor role in human livelihood. Understanding the long-term development of this practice will augment knowledge of past land use strategies to inform models of land cover and climate change. Drawing upon the results of an ethnoarchaeological study, this paper presents a review of non-irrigated agricultural practices in the absence of anthropogenic water-harvesting structures, in arid and hyper-arid lands of North Africa. A proposal on how to identify the presence and extent of these practices in the past in world's drylands at large is ultimately presented. ; DU was funded by the Italian Ministry for Foreign affairs (MAE-DGSP VI). RAINDROPS has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (ERC-Stg-2017) under grant agreement No 759800. Additional funding for fieldwork of AZ is from the University of Milano. This work is also part of the PAGES LandCover6k effort and the INQUA International Focus Group HoLa (Holocene Global Landuse). CL, SB and MM are members of CaSEs, an "Excellence Research Group" of the Catalan Agency for Research (AGAUR SGR-1417 and SGR-0212).

Numerous and extensive 'Stone Walled Sites' have been identified in southern African Iron Age landscapes. Appearing from around 1200 CE, and showing considerable variability in size and form, these settlements are named after the dry-stone wall structures that characterize them. Stone Walled Sites were occupied by various Bantu-speaking agropastoral communities. In this paper we test the use of pXRF (portable X-ray fluorescence analysis) to generate a 'supplementary' archaeological record where evident stratigraphy is lacking, survey conditions may be uneven, and excavations limited, due to the overall site size. We propose herein the application of portable X-ray fluorescence analysis (pXRF) coupled with multivariate exploratory analysis and geostatistical modelling at Seoke, a southern African SWS of historical age (18th century CE). The aim of the paper is twofold: to explore the potential of the application of a low cost, quick, and minimally invasive technique to detect chemical markers in anthropogenic sediments from a Stone Walled Site, and to propose a way to analyse the results in order to improve our understanding of the use of space at non-generalized scales in such sites. ; This research is funded by Fundación Palarq, calls 2019 and 2020, project "Geo-EtnoArqueologia y uso del espacio (GEA)" entrusted to SB. SM and FM received financial support from the Office of Research and Development at the University of Botswana. The work of SGA was funded by the European Union's MapDung project funded by the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No H2020-MSCA-IF-2017-794823. SB, JAM, ARG, CL and SGA are members of CaSEs Research Group of the Catalan Research Agency (AGAUR SGR-212), which is an associated unit (Unidad Asociada) to the Institucion Mila Y Fontanals of the Spanish Research National Council (CSIC). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. ; Peer reviewed