Historical Ecology of Demographic and Economic Change in the Highlands of Western Kenya: Archaeobotanical and Mycological Evidence

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The last several millennia of cultural history in the western Kenyan highlands have been marked both by punctuated periods of considerable demographic and economic change, and by continuous in-situ processes of genetic, linguistic, and economic interaction and admixture. Historical linguistic and archaeological models of the peopling of this region have, among other contributions, offered a rough timeline for the "arrival" and incorporation of various food production and landscape management practices into the economic repertoire of western highland populations. Archaeobotanical and mycological evidence is presented here which, in concert with a review of existing archaeological and historical-linguistic knowledge, broadly supports previously advanced narratives of the development of this region's economic lifeways over the last ca. 1500 years. Greater reliance on mixed farming/pastoralism and plant cultivation are argued to have characterized the period ca. 700 BP to the present, replacing earlier strategies emphasizing tuber cultivation, herding of domestic stock, and hunting-gathering and/or exchange with foraging groups. A centuries-long period of landscape change (ca. 500-900 BP), during which fire-based land management practices were increasingly employed, is posited to be a key timeframe for the development of landscape management strategies enabling what became traditional lifeways during the late Iron Age.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• SAA 2021: General Sessions

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33180