The Imlil Valley : Fieldwork Data

 [ fieldwork in morocco ]

The Imlil Valley snakes up into the High Atlas with Asni the village at its foot and Imlil at the head of the valley. As you progress up the unsurfaced road there are surprises like the opulent summer home at the Asni end but further you see little groups of houses clinging to the hillside. Each settlement is clan based, often with extended families living there and each trying to make a living from pastoral activities and farming. The valley in May comes alive with tree blossom, walnuts, apples and the many rivulets and streams are channelled through segueas into small fields, some no bigger than pocket handkerchiefs, with stones taken from the ground around the perimeter to keep out small flocks of sheep and goats.
During daylight hours you catch a glimpse of movement and there will be a villager hoeing the ground, weeding or planting. The makeshift irrigation channels are changed daily to give each inch of ground its water. The setting is truly medieval and the work essential for the survival of these wonderful people.

The houses clinging to the rocky hills are above the cultivated land in the river valley, they are flat roofed and in the morning come alive with colour as the blankets and rugs are hung out of windows and over walls to air. Each house tries to get a supply of water into their catchment basins fed from the riverlets by plastic piping. The orange and blue of the pipe snake across the hillsides.

We have been collecting data on fieldtrips for several years now and as a "taster" there are links to display data from 1989 so that you can form an opinion about the nature of these settlements. The data concentrates on Imlil and the villages in the immediate area and their inhabitants. The web pages shown here are partial digests of the whole data (and presented in text form because of the speed of download compared to the tables function of many browsers).The Data is also available in file format for downloading so that you may use the data directly. This file data is in two formats, the most universal being Comma Separated Value which will run on most computers and Excel format for those users with that package.