Paleoecological and Archaeological Evidence for Iron Age Economic and Ecological Transformation in the Highlands of Western Kenya

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Until recently, chronologies of food and iron production activities have been poorly resolved in the western Kenyan highlands, and have been informed largely by historical linguistics and only a handful of radiocarbon dates. New archaeological and microbotanical data are presented that allows reexamination of earlier cultural history models for this region, and provides firmer date ranges for specific food production and iron smelting activities. These data broadly support extant theories of food production for the western highland region, and identify and contextualize transformations of the ecological landscape associated therewith. Further, faunal, iron, and microbotanical evidence is presented that region-wide economic transformation from relatively mobile herding and low-intensity root crop cultivation to more sedentary herding, millet and/or sorghum cultivation, and locally-performed iron smelting characterized the early part of the last millennium BP.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 26167