ABSTRACT
Sitting in the middle of the world’s largest desert, warmed by an acacia-wood fire and with rivers of stars above, I am enchanted. Yet I internalise this Saharan space through powerful Western tropes which typify it as mystical, otherworldly, timeless: a place to encounter the self. More prosaically, I share endless tea with the Other, but I also have goat fleas and conjunctivitis. The Other, in this case, is as stereotyped as the desert, a Tuareg man of the Kel Ajjer, acting as research assistant and guide in a sparsely inhabited corner of the Libyan Sahara. Our purpose is an ethnoarchaeological project, 1 a survey of the dwellings and settlement patterns of the Kel Tadrart, a small clan of semisedentary Tuareg mostly living in Libya’s Fazzan region. The vast space we are surveying, principally the c. 250 sq km of the Acacus Mountains, a United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage (WH) site since 1985, lives up to the tropes at first glance. So, too, do the Tuareg we are interviewing. And when you stand in front of a polychromatic painted scene in a rock shelter, the WH designation of this palimpsest of rock art as being of outstanding universal value rings true.
