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Sitting in the middle of the world’s largest desert, warmed by an acacia-wood fire and with rivers of stars above, I am enchanted. Yet I internalise this Saharan space through powerful Western tropes which typify it as mystical, otherworldly, timeless: a place to encounter the self. More prosaically, I share endless tea with the Other, but I also have goat fleas and conjunctivitis. The Other, in this case, is as stereotyped as the desert, a Tuareg man of the Kel Ajjer, acting as research assistant and guide in a sparsely inhabited corner of the Libyan Sahara. Our purpose is an ethnoarchaeological project, 1 a survey of the dwellings and settlement patterns of the Kel Tadrart, a small clan of semisedentary Tuareg mostly living in Libya’s Fazzan region. The vast space we are surveying, principally the c. 250 sq km of the Acacus Mountains, a United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization …