The Jawa's are intelligent, rodentlike natives who scavenge the deserts and city alleys, looking for outmoded and abandoned hardware. The meter-high creatures wear rough-woven, homespun cloaks and hoods, protecting themselves from the fierce double suns. While their glowing eyes are visible under the hoods, and the smell of a Jawa is unmistakably nasty, few sentient beings have ever seen what a Jawa looks like without his hood. The diminutive scavengers understand Basic, but prefer to speak in their own language.

The Jawas roam Tatooine in giant, treaded fortress-homes known as sandcrawlers. Each crawler holds a Jawa community of about three hundred members. By repairing or rewiring droids and machinery that they pick up, Jawas can often make tidy profits on the desert throwaways. Despite their appearance and smelly living conditions, Jawas are excellent at repairs and at analyzing mechanical devices.

Tatooine's moisture farmers are prime targets for the Jawa's technological recycling sales. The scavengers also have a lot in Mos Eisley known as Jawa Traders, run by a female Jawa named, Aguilae. Traders specializes in vehicle-and starship-repair droids, making it the perfect marketplace for a spaceport full of pilots and smugglers.

Jawa faces are obscured by a cloud of insects that gather in the recesses of their hoods, attracted by their foul odors. Their particular stench is a combination of poor hygiene and a mysterious solution into which Jawas dip their clothes to retain moisture. To Jawas, the odor is packed with information about each other, such as clan lineage, health, emotional state, even the last meal eaten.

Jawas have evolved several important survival traits, such as exceptional night vision, a strong immune system, and an efficient digestive system that draws all the needed nutrients from the Jawa staple diet of hubba gourd. 

Jawas live in familial clans, each with distinct territories for living and scavenging. While half the clan is crammed into the warren-like compartments of a sandcrawler, scouring the deserts for usable salvage, the other half resides within a thick-walled fortress. These desert homes were built to protect the Jawas from Sand People or roaming krayt dragons. 

A chief leads each clan. Jawa leadership is usually conferred upon males -- females are viewed upon as second-class citizens at best, property at worst. The few females afforded respect in Jawa culture are the shamans. A Jawa becomes a shaman when she is overcome by an illness accompanied by a hallucinatory vision. Depending on the outcome of the vision, and indeed if the Jawa survives the illness, she is usually decreed a shaman, and her words are given the respect that such wisdom dictates. 

Once a year, the scattered Jawa clans gather for the great swap meet. Here, numerous sandcrawlers converge and the Jawas meet to exchange salvage. Marriages are arranged and Jawa children and females are exchanged among clans.

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