My primary research focusses on the contemporary and historical management of landscapes, ecological diversity, climate, and questions of sustainability, conservation, resilience and regeneration. Most of my work has focused on agricultural systems in Eastern Africa and has examined community practice and knowledge archaeologically, historically and anthropologically, often employing the perspectives of historical ecology, contemporary archaeology and post-development theory. This work has involved analyses of the spatial, material and temporal dynamics of farming systems, including understandings of soils, crops, irrigation, exchange networks and forests/vegetation over the last few hundred years. I have also explored contemporary archaeologies of forest conservation and failed external 'development' and my work is increasingly drawn towards wider analyses of food systems, agro-ecology, food sovereignty, farmer innovation, apiculture and intersections with nutrition and health. My work often employs practices of physically mapping the landscape with smartphones and working with communities of Citizen Scientists to co-design research questions and tools - including smarphone applications. This work has also involved collaborations with colleagues in South Africa and Nigeria and I am increasingly drawn to contemporary archaeological analyses of UK food systems including in the Fenland region where I take a leading role in the McDonald Institute's Fenland Futures Archaeological and Heritage Research Initiative (FFAHRI). I have also recently become engaged with the stakeholder networks at the IPBES. My broader research has explored aspects of the Later Stone Age through to Late Iron Age of Eastern Africa, including in western Kenya, eastern Uganda and South Sudan and examining themes including colonization, monumentality, food processing and the organisation of decentralized communities.
Selected Research Projects
2024-25 PI Crop Diversity for Biodiversity in International Policy (CD4Bio): a Communityof Practice engaging with IPBES. £15,000 Research England Policy Support Fund (with Franziska Fischer).
2024-25 PI Archaeology Research Training and Writing Workshop at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. £9,970 Cambridge Africa ALBORADA Research Fund (with Dr Emuobosa Orijemie).
2020-22 PI Cultivating through Crises: Empowering African Small-Holders through Histories of Creative Emergency Response (CCEASH). £149,429, AHRC-GCRF.
2020 PI Policy Review on Regenerative Agriculture for Africa. £22,505 Downforce Trust.
2019-22 PI Prosperity and Innovation in the Past and Future of Agriculture in Eastern Africa (PIPFA). £199,954, AHRC-GCRF.
2019-21 CoI Palm, Sand and Fish: Traditional Technologies of the Daughters of the Azanian Coast of East Africa. £25,013, Rising from the Depths, AHRC (with Dr Freda M'Mbogori PI)
2019-24 PI The Material Cultures of Refuge in Lebanon. £79,800, AHRC Colaborative Doctoral Award with Pitt Rivers Museum (with Prof. Dan Hicks & Dr Hanna Baumann).
2018-19 PI Indigenous African Plant Knowledge and Sustainability: a Citizen Science Project. £99,000, UCL QR Small Grants.
2016-17 CoI Unravelling Complexity: Understanding the Land-Water-Food Nexus in Marakwet, Kenya. £62,528 ESRC Nexus Network (with Prof. Henrietta Moore, PI).
2015-18 CoI Revisiting the Bantu migration Narrative: A contextual archaeological approach. $20,000 Wenner-Gren (with Dr Freda M'Mbogori, PI).
2013-15 PI Applied agro- archaeology of Eastern African farming systems. 3 years salary and research allowance, Leverhulme/Newton Trust Early Career Research Fellowship.
2013-15 CoI African farming systems: an interdisciplinary pan-African perspective. £30,000 British Academy International Partnerships and Mobility Grant (with PIs Prof. Moore and Prof. Folorunso).
2022-23 Consultant Enhancing the Capacity and Capability of Orchid Conservation in Armenia. Darwin Initiative.
<2013 AHRC Masters and Doctoral awards, ORADS Radio Carbon Dating
