Making the most of scarce biological resources in the desert: Loptuq material culture in Eastern Turkestan around 1900.

This article discusses the now extinct Loptuq material culture as it existed more than a hundred years ago, and how the scarce biological resources of their desert and marsh habitat were utilized. Loptuq adaptation strategies to the environment and local knowledge, transmitted over generations, which contributed to their survival and subsistence, were closely connected with the use of biological resources. For this study, a comprehensive approach has been adopted for the complex relationships between human, biota and landscape. The Loptuq are today largely ignored or deleted from history for political reasons and are seldom, if at all, mentioned in modern sources about the Lop Nor area. Their experience and knowledge, however, could be useful today, in a period of rapid climate change, for others living in or at the fringe of expanding deserts.