2026-04-14T03:21:42Zhttps://recercat.cat/oai/request

oai:recercat.cat:10230/586672025-12-18T01:08:10Zcom_2072_6col_2072_452952

No rain, no grain? Ethnoarchaeology of sorghum and millet cultivation in dryland environments of Sudan, Pakistan, and Ethiopia Biagetti, Stefano Ruiz-Giralt, Abel Madella, Marco Magzoub, Mongeda Khalid Meresa, Yemane Gebreselassie, Mulubrhan Haile Veesar, Ghulam Mohiuddin Abro, Tasleem Alam Chandio, Amin Lancelotti, Carla Drylands Ethnoarchaeology Rainfed cultivation Resilience Traditional ecological knowledge Pearl millet Finger millet Sorghum Includes supplemental materials for the online appendix. Drylands cover more than 40% of the earth’s land surface, are found on all continents, and are home to 30% of the world’s population. Due to water scarcity, they are generally considered unsuitable for lasting human settlement. While pastoralism has been reconceptualized recently as a rational, efficient, and sustainable way to live in drylands, agriculture without irrigation is generally considered unfeasible in hyper-arid and arid drylands. This article presents data collected in ethnographic interviews in dryland areas in three countries, Sudan, Pakistan, and Ethiopia, to document and understand the cultivation practices of pearl millet, finger millet, and sorghum in drylands. Contrary to general trends favoring adoption of more water-intensive crops, our results show that farming without irrigation represents a viable strategy even where rainfall is considered insufficient. We argue that it is important to recognize the sustainability and value of dryland agricultural systems, past, present, and future. This research is supported by RAINDROPS with funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (ERC-Stg-2017) under grant agreement 759800. 2024-01-11T11:59:21Z 2024-01-11T11:59:21Z 2021 info:eu-repo/semantics/article info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion Ethnoarchaeology: Journal of Archaeological, Ethnographic and Experimental Studies. 2021;13(1-2):80-104 info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/H2020/759800 © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Taylor & Francis