Mapping Food Production in Hyper Arid and Arid Saharan Africa in the Holocene. A View from the Present

Abstract

The reconstruction of land use practices in hyper arid Saharan Africa is often hampered by the accuracy of the available tools and by unconscious biases that see these areas as marginal and inhospitable. Considered for a long time the living space of pastoral mobile communities, new research is showing of agriculture might have been more important in these areas than previously thought. In this paper, after a review of present-day land use strategies in Saharan Africa, we show how ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological data can offer us a different point of view and help in better defining land use and food production strategies in this area. Ultimately, these insights can be integrated into the ongoing effort of reconstructing past land use globally.

Small-scale farming in drylands: New models for resilient practices of millet and sorghum cultivation

“…This entails that in all those areas where annual rainfall is lower than 300 mm, especially during the period of plant growth, it would not be possible to cultivate these crops without irrigation. However, there are examples of modern communities that do cultivate these crops extensively, under exclusively rainfed conditions, in areas where annual average precipitation is much lower [ 5 , 6 ]. This inconsistency between academic and traditional knowledge has been also highlighted in recent work by the Ceres2030 consortium ( https://ceres2030.org/ ), which identified a significant mismatch between research on solutions to world hunger and the needs of small-scale farmers [ 7 ].…”