| 1. |
- 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rangelands and restrictions on herd mobility driven by misguided conservation and economic policies are emphasised over outdated notions of pastoralist inefficiency.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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| 2. |
- 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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| 3. |
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| 4. |
- 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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| 5. |
- 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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