Africa and the Middle East are undergoing dramatic environmental, demographic, economic, and political transformations. This volume turns the spotlight on 14 endangered cultures as examples of how diverse peoples are coping with these radical evolutions in the 21st century. Little-known groups such as the Ogoni of Nigeria, who face environmental degradation from multinational exploitation of oil resources and government collusion, are presented alongside well-known groups like the Kurds, some of whom have been displaced as a result of civil war and live beneath a repressive Iraqi regime....

Scattered throughout the Great Plains are many isolated areas of varying size and ecology, quite distinct from the surrounding grasslands. Such spaces can be uplands like the Black Hills, low hills like the Nebraska Sand Hills, or linear areas such as shallow river valleys and deeply incised canyons. While the notion of islands is not a new one among ecologists, its application in Plains archaeology is.

The contributors to this volume seek to illustrate the different ways that the spatial, structural, and temporal nature of islands conditioned the behavior and adaptation of past Plains...