In the final days of the Republic, Tatooine’s Jawas haunted its Podracer tracks, waiting for the inevitable wrecks and rushing in to cart away still-smoking machinery for salvage.

When Anakin Skywalker returned to Tatooine to search for his mother, one of his first stops was a gathering of Jawa sandcrawlers. As a native, Anakin was well aware that the desert scavengers knew more about what was going on in the desert wastes than anyone else did.

Shortly after the Battle of Christophsis, Anakin crash-landed the dilapidated freighter Twilight in the deserts of Tatooine. He wasn’t surprised to find Jawas appear – seemingly out of nowhere – in hopes of scavenging the crashed ship.

During the Galactic Civil War, R2-D2 and C-3PO escaped Princess Leia’s Tantive IV, plummeting to the surface of Tatooine in an escape pod. The droids went their separate ways, with Artoo searching for Obi-Wan Kenobi. But he found a clan of scavenging Jawas instead. A blast from an ion gun overloaded Artoo’s circuits, leaving him the Jawas’ prisoner.

The Jawas carried the inert droid to their sandcrawler, fitting him with a restraining bolt and adding him to their collection of junk to be spruced up and sold.

To Artoo’s surprise, the same clan of Jawas had found his friend C-3PO. The droids were reunited, albeit in captivity.

The Jawas stopped at the Lars homestead and unloaded their saleable droids for Owen Lars and Luke Skywalker to inspect. Owen agreed to purchase C-3PO, who could communicate with the farm’s machinery, but passed on buying R2-D2. He selected a droid named R5-D4 instead.

But R5-D4 immediately blew his motivator. The Jawas reluctantly agreed to substitute R2-D2 for the malfunctioning astromech. The droids would stay together.

Unfortunately for the Jawas, the Empire’s stormtroopers were searching Tatooine for the missing droids. After learning the Jawas had sold Artoo and Threepio to the Lars family, the soldiers slaughtered the scavengers and destroyed their sandcrawler. When Luke and Obi-Wan Kenobi discovered the bodies, Luke realized his aunt and uncle were in terrible danger.