Introducing Coastal Deserts

Abstract

Arising out of a session held at the Fourth Southern Deserts Conference in Mendoza, Argentina, in November 2014, this special issue of the Journal of Island & Coastal Archaeology explores how people have dealt with these situations in the coastal deserts of the southern hemisphere. Its focus is on the diverse ways in which people have inhabited, exploited, and transformed coastal desert environments as part of the overall organization of human behavior over a period that reaches back into the Upper Pleistocene and forward into historical times.