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"Desert people."
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Living in a desert
This book takes a simple look at what it means to live in a desert. It examines basic geographical features, why people choose to live there, and dangers people might have because of living in a desert, such as extreme weather conditions. The book also looks at how people adapt to living in deserts and the different things both adults and children do in their daily lives, from desert-specific jobs to home schooling, respectively.
Book
Desert
Sand. Cacti. Lizards. Mirages. Deserts call to mind exotic places, a sense of adventure and freedom, but also thirst and desolation. In Desert, Roslynn D. Haynes takes a fresh look at this geographical feature and cultural entity as it becomes an increasingly threatened environment. Considering the immense geographical diversity of deserts from the Sahara to Antarctica, Haynes explores the intriguing and often bizarre ways plants and animals adapt to such a hostile environment, as well as the diverse peoples that have inhabited deserts and evolved unique lifestyles and cultures in response to their surroundings. She asks why Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all originated in the deserts of the Middle East and traces the connections between the minimalism of desert existence and the pursuit of a spiritual dimension. Finally, she describes the allure deserts have exerted on the West, the significance of desolate landscapes in literature and film, and the revolution in artists' responses to the desert as an empty space and as an inspiration for new visual techniques with which to view it. Ending with a look at how commercial and military interests threaten desert ecologies, Desert casts new light on our view of these seemingly barren places.
eBook
Late Holocene Research on Foragers and Farmers in the Desert West
This book brings together the work of archaeologists investigating prehistoric hunter-gatherers (foragers) and early farmers in both the Southwest and the Great Basin. Most previous work on this topic has been regionally specific, with researchers from each area favoring a different theoretical approach and little shared dialogue. Here the studies of archaeologists working in both the Southwest and the Great Basin are presented side by side to illustrate the similarities in environmental challenges and cultural practices of the prehistoric peoples who lived in these areas and to explore common research questions addressed by both regions. Three main themes link these papers: the role of the environment in shaping prehistoric behavior, flexibility in foraging and farming adaptations, and diversity in settlement strategies. Contributors cover a range of topics including the varied ways hunter-gatherers adapted to arid environments, the transition from hunting and gathering to farming and the reasons for it, the variation in early farmers across the Southwest and Great Basin, and the differing paths followed as they developed settled villages.
eBook
The Archaeology of Australia's Deserts
This is the first book-length study of the archaeology of Australia's deserts, one of the world's major habitats and the largest block of drylands in the southern hemisphere. Over the last few decades, a wealth of new environmental and archaeological data about this fascinating region has become available. Drawing on a wide range of sources, The Archaeology of Australia's Deserts explores the late Pleistocene settlement of Australia's deserts, the formation of distinctive desert societies, and the origins and development of the hunter-gatherer societies documented in the classic nineteenth-century ethnographies of Spencer and Gillen. Written by one of Australia's leading desert archaeologists, the book interweaves a lively history of research with archaeological data in a masterly survey of the field and a profoundly interdisciplinary study that forces archaeology into conversations with history and anthropology, economy and ecology, and geography and Earth sciences.
eBook
A Wild Roguery: Bruce Chatwin’s \The Songlines\ Reconsidered
This article revisits, analyzes and critiques Bruce Chatwin’s 1987 bestseller, \"The Songlines\", more than three decades after its publication. In \"Songlines\", the book primarily responsible for his posthumous celebrity, Chatwin set out to explore the essence of Central and Western Desert Aboriginal Australians’ philosophical beliefs. For many readers globally, \"Songlines\" is regarded as a—if not the—definitive entry into the epistemological basis, religion, cosmology and lifeways of classical Western and Central Desert Aboriginal people. It is argued that Chatwin’s fuzzy, ill-defined use of the word-concept “songlines” has had the effect of generating more heat than light. Chatwin’s failure to recognize the economic imperative underpinning Australian desert people’s walking praxis is problematic: his own treks through foreign lands were underpropped by socioeconomic privilege. Chatwin’s ethnocentric idée fixe regarding the primacy of “walking” and “nomadism,” central to his \"Songlines\" thématique, well and truly preceded his visits to Central Australia. Walking, proclaimed Chatwin, is an elemental part of “Man’s” innate nature. It is argued that this unwavering, preconceived, essentialist belief was a self-serving construal justifying Chatwin’s own “nomadic” adventures of identity. Is it thus reasonable to regard Chatwin as a “rogue author,” an unreliable narrator? And if so, does this matter? Of greatest concern is the book’s continuing majority acceptance as a measured, accurate account of Aboriginal belief systems. With respect to Aboriginal desert people and the barely disguised individuals depicted in \"Songlines\", is Chatwin’s book a “rogue text,” constituting an act of epistemic violence, consistent with Spivak’s usage of that term?
Journal Article
Purgatory road
\"A couple finds themselves stranded in the Mojave Desert with dwindling hope of survival--until a mysterious man shows up. Will he help them or does he have more sinister plans?\" -- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Mauritania : the vanishing oasis
Beautifully photographed, this film introduces us to a couple, Baba and his wife Fatou, and their two children who live in a tiny oasis at the outskirts of Chinguetti, once a holy city of Islam. Ninety percent of Mauritania is desert which encroaches a little every day upon the remaining arable land. Barely twenty years ago, eighty percent of Mauritania's population was nomadic. Today only twelve percent can maintain the nomadic life. Fatou had grown up in a nomadic family and struggles with her new sedentary life. The family lives as best it can by protecting their date trees which are constantly threatened by the ravages of sand. Drinking sweet tea to assuage their own hunger, they aim to keep their baby daughter plump so she can be married off at age seven. This is a memorable portrait of human beings surviving despite the forces of nature that buffet them.
Streaming Video