Pintupi - Settlements

Pintupi traditional life is highly mobile for most of the year, so encampments are only temporary, sometimes simply overnight. Such camps are segregated by gender and marital status: unmarried men and youths live in one camp, with single women in another nearby; each husband-wife pair and their young children camp together. These camps tend to be quite small. Larger aggregates of people occur at permanent water holes after periods of heavy rains. Camp shelter is a simple windbreak made of brush or, more recently, corrugated iron. The more sedentary settlements around bore holes are quite large—as many as 300 to 350 people—but the spatial deployment of individuals and family groups follows the pattern of traditional encampments.