Hadza live in spectacular and varied country. Rocky hills with wooded savanna are their most common residence; forest-capped mountains, the expanse of the lake, and the rift escarpments are their daily view. For the Hadza researcher, it is a relief to see the popular contrast of forest and plains corrected by Belsky among others. But let's begin at the beginning. The rift dominates the scenery, influences the climate and the soil, generates the water supply, and ultimately determines the population densities and economic activities of the region around Lake Eyasi. In this chapter, I aim to describe the climatic, floral, and faunal environment in which we observed the Hadza, suggest some implications, and align the current conditions with what we can determine about the historical and prehistoric conditions. The recent tome by Spinage (2012) has been a valuable backup to my own literature searches.

Most of the eastern Hadza live in a roughly rectangular area south and east of Lake Eyasi in the bottom of the rift valley, southwest of Ngorongoro crater. The area measures just 90 km × 40 km (3600 km2) (55 miles × 25 miles), a little larger than the Los Angeles basin, or Long Island New York, and about the size of a middling English county. Figure 2.1 shows the general features of the area around Lake Eyasi. The map marks non-Hadza villages mentioned in the text, and shows the general areas inhabited by Hadzane speakers. Figure 2.2 shows the location of Hadza camps that we visited between 1985 and 2000. One of the most striking features is the proximity to Ngorongoro crater, Laetoli, Olduvai, and Serengeti. The main tourist road passes a mere 25 km from the northernmost Hadza camps, but the Hadza are separated from this road by 500–1000 m (1600–3300 ft) in altitude, and more important differences in habitat. The area where most eastern Hadza live had remained very sparsely populated and little visited until the final 20 years of the twentieth century.