Lancelotti, CarlaBiagetti, Stefano2021-05-072021-05-072021Lancelotti C, Biagetti S. Mapping food production in hyper-arid and arid Saharan Africa in the holocene: a view from the present. Quaternary. 2021 Apr 22;4(2):13. DOI: 10.3390/quat40200132571-550Xhttp://hdl.handle.net/10230/47353The 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 that this has been for a long time the living space of pastoral mobile communities, new research is showing that 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 efforts to reconstruct past land use globally.application/pdfeng© 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.3390/quat4020013DrylandsLand useAridity indexEthnographyEthnoarchaeologyPastoralismAgricultureLandCover6Kinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess