Resilience Theory and Human-Environment Interactions during the Early Holocene at Lothagam-Lokam, Northern Kenya

Summary

The pluvial conditions during the African Humid Period of the Early-to-Mid Holocene profoundly influenced environments across northern and eastern Africa, expanding lakes, rivers, and grassland ecologies. Archaeologists have often explained human responses to these increasingly aquatic environment as in terms of an increasing reliance on fisher-hunter-gatherer economies. Similarly, once the AHP ended, humans abandoned these lifeways. These perspectives are overly deterministic; in this paper, we approach this problem by adapting a Resilience Theory framework to examine a (type site?) case-site on the Lothagam-Lokam site near Lake Turkana, Kenya. New excavations at Lothagam-Lokam have uncovered a sequence of small-scale local environmental shifts with interstratified cultural horizons that spans the entire Holocene. We argue that people’s decisions to intensify or re-organize their economic strategies shaped their options and cultural attitudes in responding to subsequent stresses when faced with small-scale environmental fluctuations around Turkana. The interconnected cultural and economic systems gradually assembled through multiple resilience cycles ultimately conditioned responses to more extreme events such as the 60 m drop in Turkana’s lake level at the end of the AHP. Our application of Resilience Theory at Lokam provides a potential path forward for more nuanced discussions of human-environment interactions during the AHP.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20065