| 1. |
- Armstrong, Chelsey, et al.
(författare)
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Anthropological contributions to historical ecology : 50 questions, infinite prospects
- 2017
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Ingår i: PLOS ONE. - : Public Library of Science (PLoS). - 1932-6203. ; 12:2
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper presents the results of a consensus-driven process identifying 50 priority research questions for historical ecology obtained through crowdsourcing, literature reviews, and in-person workshopping. A deliberative approach was designed to maximize discussion and debate with defined outcomes. Two in-person workshops (in Sweden and Canada) over the course of two years and online discussions were peer facilitated to define specific key questions for historical ecology from anthropological and archaeological perspectives. The aim of this research is to showcase the variety of questions that reflect the broad scope for historical-ecological research trajectories across scientific disciplines. Historical ecology encompasses research concerned with decadal, centennial, and millennial human-environmental interactions, and the consequences that those relationships have in the formation of contemporary landscapes. Six interrelated themes arose from our consensus-building workshop model: (1) climate and environmental change and variability; (2) multi-scalar, multi-disciplinary; (3) biodiversity and community ecology; (4) resource and environmental management and governance; (5) methods and applications; and (6) communication and policy. The 50 questions represented by these themes highlight meaningful trends in historical ecology that distill the field down to three explicit findings. First, historical ecology is fundamentally an applied research program. Second, this program seeks to understand long-term human-environment interactions with a focus on avoiding, mitigating, and reversing adverse ecological effects. Third, historical ecology is part of convergent trends toward transdisciplinary research science, which erodes scientific boundaries between the cultural and natural.
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| 2. |
- Boles, Oliver J. C., et al.
(författare)
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Historical Ecologies of Pastoralist Overgrazing in Kenya : Long-Term Perspectives on Cause and Effect
- 2019
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Ingår i: Human Ecology. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0300-7839 .- 1572-9915. ; 47:3, s. 419-434
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The spectre of overgrazing' looms large in historical and political narratives of ecological degradation in savannah ecosystems. While pastoral exploitation is a conspicuous driver of landscape variability and modification, assumptions that such change is inevitable or necessarily negative deserve to be continuously evaluated and challenged. With reference to three case studies from Kenya - the Laikipia Plateau, the Lake Baringo basin, and the Amboseli ecosystem - we argue that the impacts of pastoralism are contingent on the diachronic interactions of locally specific environmental, political, and cultural conditions. The impacts of the compression of rangelands and restrictions on herd mobility driven by misguided conservation and economic policies are emphasised over outdated notions of pastoralist inefficiency. We review the application of overgrazing' in interpretations of the archaeological record and assess its relevance for how we interpret past socio-environmental dynamics. Any discussion of overgrazing, or any form of human-environment interaction, must acknowledge spatio-temporal context and account for historical variability in landscape ontogenies.
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| 3. |
- Crowther, Alison, et al.
(författare)
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Coastal Subsistence, Maritime Trade, and the Colonization of Small Offshore Islands in Eastern African Prehistory
- 2016
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Ingår i: Journal of Island & Coastal Archaeology. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1556-4894 .- 1556-1828. ; 11:2, s. 211-237
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Recent archaeological research has firmly established eastern Africa's offshore islands as important localities for understanding the region's pre-Swahili maritime adaptations and early Indian Ocean trade connections. While the importance of the sea and small offshore islands to the development of urbanized and mercantile Swahili societies has long been recognized, the formative stages of island colonizationand in particular the processes by which migrating Iron Age groups essentially became maritimeare still relatively poorly understood. Here we present the results of recent archaeological fieldwork in the Mafia Archipelago, which aims to understand these early adaptations and situate them within a longer-term trajectory of island settlement and pre-Swahili cultural developments. We focus on the results of zooarchaeological, archaeobotanical, and material culture studies relating to early subsistence and trade on this island to explore the changing significance of marine resources to the local economy. We also discuss the implications of these maritime adaptations for the development of local and long-distance Indian Ocean trade networks.
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| 4. |
- Marchant, Rob, et al.
(författare)
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Drivers and trajectories of land cover change in East Africa : Human and environmental interactions from 6000 years ago to present
- 2018
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Ingår i: Earth-Science Reviews. - : Elsevier. - 0012-8252 .- 1872-6828. ; 178, s. 322-378
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- East African landscapes today are the result of the cumulative effects of climate and land-use change over millennial timescales. In this review, we compile archaeological and palaeoenvironmental data from East Africa to document land-cover change, and environmental, subsistence and land-use transitions, over the past 6000 years. Throughout East Africa there have been a series of relatively rapid and high-magnitude environmental shifts characterised by changing hydrological budgets during the mid- to late Holocene. For example, pronounced environmental shifts that manifested as a marked change in the rainfall amount or seasonality and subsequent hydrological budget throughout East Africa occurred around 4000, 800 and 300 radiocarbon years before present (yr BP). The past 6000 years have also seen numerous shifts in human interactions with East African ecologies. From the mid-Holocene, land use has both diversified and increased exponentially, this has been associated with the arrival of new subsistence systems, crops, migrants and technologies, all giving rise to a sequence of significant phases of land-cover change. The first large-scale human influences began to occur around 4000 yr BP, associated with the introduction of domesticated livestock and the expansion of pastoral communities. The first widespread and intensive forest clearances were associated with the arrival of iron-using early farming communities around 2500 yr BP, particularly in productive and easily-cleared mid-altitudinal areas. Extensive and pervasive land-cover change has been associated with population growth, immigration and movement of people. The expansion of trading routes between the interior and the coast, starting around 1300 years ago and intensifying in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries CE, was one such process. These caravan routes possibly acted as conduits for spreading New World crops such as maize (Zea mays), tobacco (Nicotiana spp.) and tomatoes (Solanum lycopersicum), although the processes and timings of their introductions remains poorly documented. The introduction of southeast Asian domesticates, especially banana (Musa spp.), rice (Oryza spp.), taro (Colocasia esculenta), and chicken (Gallus gallus), via transoceanic biological transfers around and across the Indian Ocean, from at least around 1300 yr BP, and potentially significantly earlier, also had profound social and ecological consequences across parts of the region. Through an interdisciplinary synthesis of information and metadatasets, we explore the different drivers and directions of changes in land-cover, and the associated environmental histories and interactions with various cultures, technologies, and subsistence strategies through time and across space in East Africa. This review suggests topics for targeted future research that focus on areas and/or time periods where our understanding of the interactions between people, the environment and land-cover change are most contentious and/or poorly resolved. The review also offers a perspective on how knowledge of regional land-use change can be used to inform and provide perspectives on contemporary issues such as climate and ecosystem change models, conservation strategies, and the achievement of nature-based solutions for development purposes.
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| 5. |
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| 6. |
- Petek, Nik, 1989-
(författare)
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Archaeological Perspectives on Risk and Community Resilience in the Baringo Lowlands, Kenya
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This historical ecological research provides a detailed insight into the risk avoidance and resilience building strategies in the Lake Baringo basin in Kenya through the lens of archaeology. It explores how changes in subsistence, habitation, and landscape shaped each other and how that affected the available strategies of risk avoidance and resilience building. While the focus is on the history and archaeology of the Ilchamus, a Maa community currently occupying the area, the research additionally investigated the late Holocene of the Baringo lowlands to provide a basis for the discussion on risk and resilience. A combination of remote sensing, foot surveys, excavation, and spatial statistic methods establishes a culture history for the region, showing that the Lake Baringo basin has been part of the pastoralist cultural sphere for the past three millennia and that the Rift Valley bottom possibly acted as a frontier between different archaeological cultures. By the end of the 18th or the beginning of the 19th century the area was occupied by Ilchamus. They established densely aggregated settlements and a vast irrigation system in order to enmesh themselves into the local, regional, and global exchange system. Through the exchange system, they would ensure their ‘social survival’ and build social contracts as part of their resilience building strategies, which continued to be practiced even as the Ilchamus subsistence and habitation practices as well as the political situation changed. However, as archaeological assemblages and ethnoarchaeological and historical data show, throughout their 200-year history community conformity and consolidation were central forces in the formation of an Ilchamus identity and a strong community resilience.The environmental degradation of the Lake Baringo area has been the subject of studies for almost a century with the subsistence practices of the local communities seen as a key cause for it. This research moves beyond blame but instead explores the options available and choices taken by the Ilchamus community in specific environmental and political contexts. I hope that this thesis provides some insights into new avenues of exploration of how we can develop and strengthen the resilience of vulnerable communities, such as Ilchamus.
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| 7. |
- Petek, Nik, 1989-, et al.
(författare)
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Ethnogenesis and surplus food production: communitas and identity building among nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ilchamus, Lake Baringo, Kenya
- 2017
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Ingår i: World archaeology. - London : Routledge. - 0043-8243 .- 1470-1375. ; 49:1, s. 40-60
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Most archaeological discussions of surplus production tend to focus either on its role in the emergence and maintenance of social complexity (whether among hunter-gatherers, farming communities or incipient states) or on the enabling properties of surplus as a basis for technological advances and aesthetic elaboration. Here, we offer a rather different perspective on surplus as an initiator of communitas and driver of ethnogenesis following a period of intense socio-ecological stress, environmental degradation and localized demographic decline during the nineteenth century. The particular case study concerns the Maa-language-speaking Ilchamus community who currently occupy areas around the southern end of Lake Baringo in the Central Rift Valley, Kenya. Drawing on a combination of new archaeological evidence, oral accounts and archival sources, the paper details the processes whereby destitute groups were drawn together into acts of surplus food production, initially of grain via the implementation of a system of irrigated agriculture and subsequently of cattle through the mobilization of kinship and related ties. In so doing, disparate older identities were abandoned or transformed and a different, unifying ethnicity – Ilchamus – emerged based on a new moral economy of shared prosperity.
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| 8. |
- van der Plas, Geert W., et al.
(författare)
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Distinct phases of natural landscape dynamics and intensifying human activity in the central Kenya Rift Valley during the past 1300 years
- 2019
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Ingår i: Quaternary Science Reviews. - : PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD. - 0277-3791 .- 1873-457X. ; 218, s. 91-106
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Socio-ecological stresses currently affecting the semi-arid regions of equatorial East Africa are driving environmental changes that need to be placed in a proper context of long-term human-climate-landscape interaction. Here we present a detailed reconstruction of past human influences on the landscape of the central Kenya Rift Valley, against the backdrop of natural climate-driven ecosystem dynamics over the past 1300 years. Proxy records of vegetation dynamics (pollen), animal husbandry (fungal spores), biomass burning (charcoal) and soil mobilization (clastic mineral influx) extracted from the continuous depositional archive of Lake Bogoria reveal six distinct phases of human activity. From ca 700 to 1430 CE, strong primary response of savanna woodland ecotonal vegetation to climatic moisture-balance variation suggests that anthropogenic influence on regional ecosystem dynamics was limited. The first unambiguous ecological signature of human activities involves a mid-15th century reduction of woodland/forest trees followed by the appearance of cereal pollen, both evidence for mixed farming. From the mid-17th century, animal husbandry became a significant ecological factor and reached near-modern levels by the mid-19th century, after severe early-19th century drought had substantially changed human-landscape interaction. A short-lived peak in biomass burning and evidence for soil mobilization in low-lying areas of the Bogoria catchment likely reflects the known 19th-century establishment of irrigation agriculture, while renewed expansion of forest and woodland trees reflect the return of a wetter climate and abandonment of other farmland. Since the mid-20th century, the principal signature of human activity within the Lake Bogoria catchment is the unprecedented increase in clastic sediment flux, reflecting widespread soil erosion associated with rapidly intensifying land use. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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