Research Projects in the Department of Archaeology

As the world's remaining hunting and gathering societies interact more actively with their settled agricultural neighbours, they face major changes in their diet, mobility and community networks. The 5-year MOBILE project is studying the impact of these changes on the health and biological diversity of traditionally hunter-gatherer communities in Indonesia, in order to better understand human experience and evolution in tropical forest environments.

This project is a response to calls to build long-term sustainability and resilience into pastoral social-ecological systems in sub-Saharan Africa through provision of deep histories of human-environment interactions. It focuses on collecting and analysing archaeological and related data on the responses of pastoralist communities inhabiting the Laikipia and Leroghi plateaus, northern Kenya, to cycles of extreme drought and enhanced rainfall over the last millennium.