Global deserts in perspective / Mike Smith, Peter Veth, Peter Hiscock and Lynley A. Wallis -- Theoretical shifts in the anthropology of desert hunter-gatherers / Thomas Widlok -- Pleistocene settlement of deserts from an Australian perspective / Peter Hiscock and Lynley A. Wallis -- Arid paradises of dangerous landscapes : a review of explanations for paleolithic-assemblage change in arid Australia and Africa / Peter Hiscock and Sue O'Connor -- Evolutionary and ecological understandings of the economics of desert societies : comparing the Great Basin USA and the Australian deserts / Douglas W. Bird and Rebecca Bliege Bird -- Cycles of aridity and human mobility : risk minimization amongst Late Pleistocene foragers of the Western Desert, Australia / Peter Veth -- Archaic faces to head-dresses : the changing role of rock art across the arid zone / Jo McDonald -- The archaeology of the Patagonia deserts : hunter-gatherers in a cold desert / Luis Alberto Borrero -- Perspectives on later Stone Age hunter-gatherer archaeology in arid southern Africa / Anne Thackeray -- Long term transitions in hunter-gatherers of coastal northwest Australia / Kathryn Przywolnik -- Hunter-gatherers and herders of the Kalahari during the Late Holocene / Karim Sadr -- Desert archaeology, linguistic stratigraphy, and the spread of the western desert language / Mike Smith -- People of the coastal Atacama Desert : living between sand dunes and waves of the Pacific Ocean / Calogera M. Santoro, Bernardo T.