Reassessing Plants and Pastoralist Foodways in Ancient Eastern Africa: A Preliminary Report on New Excavations at Luxmanda, Tanzania

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Exploring Long-Term Pastoral Dynamics: Methods, Theories, Stories" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Scholars increasingly emphasize that pastoralist foodways centered on livestock systems—being variable and flexible—are especially responsive to climate stress and other drivers of food insecurity. We ask something ostensibly simple but as yet poorly understood in eastern Africa: How, and why, have pastoralist foodways changed over time? Pastoralist economies have been examined primarily through animal bones found at archaeological sites; new isotopic and molecular methods have shed light on patterns of dairy consumption. We hypothesize that wild and/or indigenous crop plants would have been deeply embedded in pastoralist cuisines throughout the Pastoral Neolithic (ca. 5000–1200 BP) as well. Excavations at the 3,000-year-old pastoralist site of Luxmanda, Tanzania, have yielded preliminary evidence suggesting plant processing on grinding stones. We challenge analogical frames of reference, which have long foregrounded the (modern?) triad of milk, meat, and blood, used to understand early pastoralist cuisines in eastern Africa. Ethnobotanical work with pastoralist and agropastoralist communities in this region will aid in contextualizing archaeological findings and provide critically needed reference material as well. Finally, we introduce the discovery of a new site near Lake Basotu in north-central Tanzania that may finally allow for regional archaeological comparison.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Exploring Long-Term Pastoral Dynamics: Methods, Theories, Stories

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39689.0