Book Reviews
The Archaeology of Drylands, Living at the Margin. Graeme Barker and David Gilbertson (Editors), 2000, Routledge, New York, xxviii ฯฉ 372 pp., $130.00 (hardcover).
The core of this publication is a set of papers delivered at a symposium on drylands archaeology held at the World Archaeology Congress in Cape Town in 1999, with additional papers added to fill out the volume. There are 18 papers in all, beginning with an introductory paper by the two editors. The second contribution, a paper by Spellman, considers the climatology of drylands. The remainder of the book is divided into five geographical regions. Southwest and Central Asia, the Sahara and Sahel, and Eastern and Southern Africa are discussed in four papers each, while North and Central America, and Europe are the subject of two papers apiece.
The papers focus on agricultural and pastoral economic adaptations to desert environments within societies of varying degrees of complexity, but no hunter-gatherer studies are included. Many of the strategies used to survive in desert environments (e.g., trapping sediments, trapping water, redirecting water, shifting economic strategies, recovering water from underground sources, and exploitation of desert flora) are found in many different areas and time periods. However, descriptions of these specific practices are not the most important contribution of this volume. Rather, two basic concepts discussed by the majority of the authors provide the most interesting and useful debate.
One of the more important issues is that of desertifaction or human-induced environmental degradation. Many ecologists today (yes, there still are a few around; they're not all microbiologists!) and a number of the authors of this volume believe that human activity played a pivotal role in the degradation of ecosystems in dryland environments. Barker in "Farmers, Herders and Miners in the Wadi Faynan, Southern Jordan: A 10,000-Year Landscape Archaeology" (Chapter 4), Ballais in "Conquests and Land Degradation in the Eastern Maghreb During Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages" (Chapter 7), Mattingly in "Twelve Thousand Years of Human Adaptation in Fezzan, Libyan Sahara" (Chapter 9), Sutton in "Engaruka: Farming by Irrigation in Maasailand c. AD 1400-1700" (Chapter 11), and van der Leeuw in "Desertification, Land Degradation and Land Abandonment in the Rho หne Valley, France" (Chapter 18) all suggest that humans were pivotal in bringing about environmental degradation. However, Gilberson, Hunt, and Gillmore in "Success, Longevity, and Failure: Romano-Libyan Floodwater Farming in the Tripolitanian Pre-Desert" (Chapter 8) present an intriguing alternative by suggesting that the Roman and Islamic occupations in the Libyan desert actually improved the environment through their water management practices. Minnis in "Prehistoric Agriculture and Anthropogenic Ecology of the North American Southwest" (Chapter 15) argues that the small-scale societies that lived in the drylands of North America were not densely populated enough to cause lasting ecological impacts but that current intensive land-use is having long lasting effects.
Another important argument discussed in a number of papers is that desert settlements were possibly only as satellite nodes of larger settlement and economic systems that exploited a variety of regions. Rosen in "The Decline of Desert Agriculture: A View from the Classical Period Negev" (Chapter 3) cogently argues that the lifeways of peoples living in the Negev were dependent on societies living in the Mediterranean and other regions, and that these people were directly influenced by political, military, and religious factors outside of the Negev. Newson in "Differing Strategies for Water Supply and Farming in the Syrian Black Desert" (Chapter 5) and Nesbitt and O'Hara in "Irrigation Agriculture in Central Asia: a Long-Term Perspective from Turkmenistan" (Chapter 6) make similar cases. As contrasting examples, Soper in "The Agricultural Landscape of the Nyanga Area of Zimbabwe" (Chapter 12) and Wilgren in "Islands of Intensive Agriculture in African Drylands: Towards an Explanatory Framework" (Chapter