Facing the Sea of Sand: The Sahara and the Peoples of North Africa

The Sahara, the world’s largest hot desert, is often visualized as only sand, but its composition is actually multifaceted with sand, mountains, plateaus, oases, and marshes. The area is defined by conflict between humans and their environment with the crux being control of resources. Archaeologist Cunliffe’s (emeritus, European archaeology, Univ. of Oxford; Bretons and Britons) magnum opus documents more than 5,000 years of African culture, and he analyzes the Sahara Desert and its intricate ecosystem and ingenious people through the larger lens of Africa’s continental history: geography, weather, civilizations, languages, religions, and nation-state boundary changes. This approach seeks to disprove that propagated remote cultures were not inventive, only influenced. Yet, a continent-wide exacting analysis of rich history was successfully compiled. Distilling an extraordinary amount of Saharan research into a readable narrative is an accomplishment in itself. Successfully placing it into a continental and global context is genius.