Word: deserts
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...shine is that Ondaatje alchemizes these abstract spaces with a poet's fluent radiance. Scene after scene shimmers with the jeweled brilliance of Arab poetry. The Indian alone, in the course of his wanderings, walks through cities where corpses are strung from trees and sleeps beside angels in deserted churches. He sees the Virgin Mary emerging from the sea (until her batteries give out), and he finds himself one of 12 defusers alone in a city without lights. Woven through such flights are colorful threads of historical arcana: richly researched evocations of the "desert Englishmen" of the '30s, lilting allusions...
...glacial stream, protected from currents and preserved by the frigid -6 degrees C temperature, the Iceman lay undisturbed for more than 53 centuries. And centuries more might have passed before he was discovered were it not for a foehn that last year delivered tons of North African desert sand to the Alpine ridges. "This is a common phenomenon," explains climatologist Dreiseitel, "but in 1991 it coincided with a winter that produced little snow, and the coating of sand increased the rate of melt on the high peaks." All over the Alps that summer, glaciers retreated -- including Similaun. Even then...
Chalcolithic smiths had determined that naturally occurring arsenic-laced copper was shinier and easier to work than the unalloyed metal. The discovery contributed to the extraordinary beauty of their ceremonial objects, jewelry and vessels, exemplified by the Judean desert treasures -- a cache of objects found in a cave in 1961. "Their art was versatile, so beautiful, so different from anything that came before or after," says Miriam Tadmor, senior curator at Jerusalem's Israel Museum. Indeed, in the opinion of her colleague Osnat Misch, "the culture of the later Bronze Age was inferior aesthetically...
...Egyptians were far ahead of anyone else in Africa, but the 4th millennium B.C. was a crucial time for the rest of the continent as well. The climate started to get progressively dryer, and the Sahara expanded into a vast desert. Nomadic tribes that herded cattle, sheep and goats on the fringes of the Sahara and the Sahel and in the Sudan were forced southward to the Central African savannas, where they gradually displaced hunter-gatherers who had dominated the area for thousands of years. Only in southern Africa, where farming was difficult, did the Stone Age hunter-gatherers...
...growing more complex in Mexico and Central America, but it was at its most elaborate in parts of South America. Settlers in the Ayacucho region of the Andes had domesticated guinea pigs and llamas by the time Iceman lived, and farmed potatoes, squash, beans and corn. Along the coastal desert of what is now northern Chile, the Chinchorro used woven fishing nets and hooks made of cactus thorns, shell and bone to harvest a rich diet from the sea. The Chinchorro, who were savvy hunters, developed elaborate mummification techniques some 2,500 years before the Egyptians, probably as a sacrament...