Resilience and Adaptation to Drylands: Long-Term Knowledge as a Path to Sustainable Agricultural Practices in Drylands

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Cultivating Food, Land, and Communities" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The incorporation of time-tested practices, encompassing Traditional Knowledge (TK), Local Knowledge (LK), and Indigenous Knowledge (IK), into sustainable agrifood system development has gained substantial traction. These practices are designed to address challenges such as food sustainability, food sovereignty, and enhancements to agrosystems. TK is defined as: “knowledge honed over centuries and adapted to local cultural and environmental contexts”. Yet, while TK encapsulates millennia of experiential wisdom, the insights derived from Long-Term Knowledge (LTK) have yet to be fully harnessed. Many ancient systems demonstrated greater longevity than modern infrastructure and were often inherently more sustainable consuming less energy, being easier to operate and maintain, and having more communal governance structures. In this talk I will present the results of RAINDROPS, an interdisciplinary project that combines experimental cultivation, ethnoarchaeology, modeling, and archaeobotany to trace the time depth of cultivation of drought-tolerant crops in drylands. I present two case studies related to the Indus Civilization in Pakistan and the Askum Civilization in northern Ethiopia. The results show how traditional rainfed cultivation dates back several millennia and has remained active since the present, albeit in small, fast-disappearing pockets.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Cultivating Food, Land, and Communities

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 41552.0