LHEAAPS aims to reconstruct the past adaptive strategies of East African pastoralists, and their relative resilience to environmental shocks under different systems of land management, rangeland access, and population and livestock densities across Kenya. The research is designed to generate knowledge that has applied value geared toward enhancing the socio-ecological and cultural resilience and sustainable livelihood strategies of contemporary pastoral societies in the face of current global challenges.
The project has four main research questions:
- What were the responses of past herding societies to environmental shocks (e.g., prolonged drought, extreme flooding, epizootic diseases, locusts) in the past and how do these compare with current responses? Can evidence for enhanced or reduced vulnerability and resilience be detected archaeologically?
- How did pastoralist livelihoods in the study area respond to changes in mobility, and what were the cultural and socio-ecological consequences of these actions? Is there evidence to suggest pastoralist societies had more effective risk buffering strategies that strengthened resilience in the past compared with now, and if so, what were they?
- What strategies previously practiced in the area could enhance sustainability in the contemporary context of decreased access to mobile exploitation of natural resources and pressures towards sedentism and seasonal transhumance?
- What role can traditional ecological knowledge and pastoralist biocultural heritage play in enhancing contemporary socio-ecological and cultural resilience in the face of climatic stress?
Once sites have been identified through archaeological survey, remote sensing and oral history, new material will be analysed through a combination of bioarchaeological, geoarchaeological and archaeometry techniques.
The project aims to develop policy briefs and white papers to inform future-oriented land use and environmental management, as well as supporting sustainable development. The research team will engage with local groups through school visits, community meetings and a travelling exhibition.
The project team includes a post-doctoral fellow and two doctoral candidates specifically recruited for the project. Internal project collaborators include Professor Marcos Martinón-Torres, Dr Tamsin O’Connell, Dr Enrico Crema and Dr Stefania Merlo, who will also provide supervisory support for the PhD candidates, and Mr David Redhouse, who will provide technical support for the GIS and remote sensing elements. The team will work closely with research scientists at the National Museums of Kenya, especially palaeoecologists and archaeologists, the British Institute in Eastern Africa, and the Department of Chemistry, University of Bristol. Team members will also work with the wider MAEASaM project, especially with data sharing and methods development.
The project builds on Prof Lane’s research interest and expertise in the deep histories and historical ecologies of East African landscapes that began while he was based at the BIEA with funding from the British Academy, and was extended while he held a Marie Curie Excellence grant (Historical Ecologies of East African Landscapes) at the University of York, and coordinated a Marie Curie International Training Network (Resilience in East African Landscapes) and managed the Swedish Research Council- and Sida-funded research project on Adaptation and Resilience to Climate Change while at Uppsala University. Ongoing work funded by the McDonald Institute on a Pastoral Iron Age burial ossuary in north-central Kenya and on the archaeology and heritage of wells in northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia, originally funded by the British Academy, also align with the wider project goals.
