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East African ecosystems have been shaped by long-term socio-ecological–environmental interactions. Although much previous work on human–environment interrelationships have emphasised the negative impacts of human interventions, a growing body of work shows that there have also often been strong beneficial connections between people and ecosystems, especially in savanna environments. However, limited information and understanding of past interactions between humans and ecosystems of periods longer than a century hampers effective management of contemporary environments. Here, we present a late Holocene study of pollen, fern spore, fungal spore, and charcoal analyses from radiocarbon-dated sediment sequences and assess this record against archaeological and historical data to describe socio-ecological changes on the Laikipia Plateau in Rift Valley Province, Kenya. The results suggest a landscape characterised by closed forests between 2268 years before present (cal year BP) and 1615 cal year BP when there was a significant change to a more open woodland/grassland mosaic that continues to prevail across the study area. Increased amounts of charcoal in the sediment are observed for this same period, becoming particularly common from around 900 cal year BP associated with fungal spores commonly linked to the presence of herbivores. It is likely these trends reflect changes in land use management as pastoral populations improved and extended pasture, using fire to eradicate disease-prone habitats. Implications for contemporary land use management are discussed in the light of these findings.

Funder: Global Challenges Research Fund – Well-Being: Indigenous Wells, Pastoralist Biocultural Heritage and Community Archaeology for Sustainable Development in Northern Kenya and Southern Ethiopia; Grant(s): 2018, The region of Southern Ethiopia (Borana) and Northern Kenya (Marsabit) is characterised by erratic rainfall, limited surface water, aridity, and frequent droughts. An important adaptive response to these conditions, of uncertain antiquity, has been the hand-excavation of a sequence of deep wells at key locations often along seasonal riverbeds and valley bottoms where subterranean aquifers can be tapped. Sophisticated indigenous water management systems have developed to ensure equitable access to these critical water resources, and these are part of well-defined customary institutional leadership structures that govern the community giving rise to a distinctive form of biocultural heritage. These systems, and the wells themselves, are increasingly under threat, however, from climate change, demographic growth, and socio-economic development. To contribute to an assessment of the scale, distribution and intensity of these threats, this study aimed to evaluate the land-use land-cover (LULC) and precipitation changes in this semi-arid to arid landscape and their association with, and impact on, the preservation of traditional wells. Multitemporal Landsat 5, 7 and 8 satellite imagery covering the period 1990 to 2020, analysed at a temporal resolution of 10 years, was classified using supervised classification via the Random Forest machine learning method to extract the following classes: bare land, grassland, shrub land, open forest, closed forest, croplands, settlement and waterbodies. Change detection was then applied to identify and quantify changes through time and landscape degradation indices were generated using the Shannon Diversity Index fragmentation index within a 15 km buffer of each well cluster. The results indicated that land cover change was mostly driven by increasing anthropogenic changes with resultant reduction in natural land cover classes. Furthermore, increased fragmentation has occurred within most of the selected buffer distances of the well clusters. The main drivers of change that have directly or indirectly impacted land degradation and the preservation of indigenous water management systems were identified through an analysis of land cover changes in the last 30 years, supporting insights from previous focused group discussions with communities in Kenya and Ethiopia. Our approach showed that remote sensing methods can be used for the spatially explicit mapping of landscape structure around the wells, and ultimately towards assessment of the preservation status of the indigenous wells.

The Rising from the Depths (RftD) network aims to identify the ways in which Marine Cultural Heritage (MCH) can contribute to the sustainable development of coastal communities in Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique and Madagascar. Although the coastal and marine heritage of eastern Africa is a valuable cultural and environmental resource, it remains largely unstudied and undervalued and is subject to significant threat from natural and anthropogenic processes of change. This paper outlines the aims of the RftD network and describes the co-creation of a challenge-led research and sustainability programme for the study of MCH in eastern Africa. Through funding 29 challenge-led research projects across these four Global South countries, the network is demonstrating how MCH can directly benefit East African communities and local economies through building identity and place-making, stimulating resource-centred alternative sources of income and livelihoods, and enhancing the value and impact of overseas aid in the marine sector. Overall, Rising from the Depths aims to illustrate that an integrated consideration of cultural heritage, rather than being a barrier to development, should be positioned as a central facet of the transformative development process if that development is to be ethical, inclusive and sustainable.

Research on the social dimensions of climate change is increasingly focused on people's experiences, values and relations to the environment as a means to understand how people interpret and adapt to changes. However, a particular challenge has been making seemingly temporally and geographically distant climate change more immediate and local so as to prompt behavioural change. Environmental humanists, anthropologists and historians have tried to address the challenge through analysis of the experiences, philosophies and memories of weather. Archaeology, commonly preoccupied by hard science approaches to climate change, has largely been absent from this conversation. Nevertheless, with its insights into material outcomes of human experiences and relations, it can become integral to the discussion of ‘weathering’ climate change and historicizing weather. Here, drawing on the subtleties of responses by Ilchamus communities in Kenya and using a mix of historical and archaeological sources, we highlight their experiences of weather since the end of the Little Ice Age and explore the potential of building archaeologies of weather.

East African landscapes today are the result of the cumulative effects of climate and land-use change over millennial timescales. In this review, we compile archaeological and palaeoenvironmental data from East Africa to document land-cover change, and environmental, subsistence and land-use transitions, over the past 6000 years. Throughout East Africa there have been a series of relatively rapid and high-magnitude environmental shifts characterised by changing hydrological budgets during the mid- to late Holocene. For example, pronounced environmental shifts that manifested as a marked change in the rainfall amount or seasonality and subsequent hydrological budget throughout East Africa occurred around 4000, 800 and 300 radiocarbon years before present (yr BP). The past 6000 years have also seen numerous shifts in human interactions with East African ecologies. From the mid-Holocene, land use has both diversified and increased exponentially, this has been associated with the arrival of new subsistence systems, crops, migrants and technologies, all giving rise to a sequence of significant phases of land-cover change. The first large-scale human influences began to occur around 4000 yr BP, associated with the introduction of domesticated livestock and the expansion of pastoral communities. The first widespread and intensive forest clearances were associated with the arrival of iron-using early farming communities around 2500 yr BP, particularly in productive and easily-cleared mid-altitudinal areas. Extensive and pervasive land-cover change has been associated with population growth, immigration and movement of people. The expansion of trading routes between the interior and the coast, starting around 1300 years ago and intensifying in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries CE, was one such process. These caravan routes possibly acted as conduits for spreading New World crops such as maize (Zea mays), tobacco (Nicotiana spp.) and tomatoes (Solanum lycopersicum), although the processes and timings of their introductions remains poorly documented. The introduction of southeast Asian domesticates, especially banana (Musa spp.), rice (Oryza spp.), taro (Colocasia esculenta), and chicken (Gallus gallus), via transoceanic biological transfers around and across the Indian Ocean, from at least around 1300 yr BP, and potentially significantly earlier, also had profound social and ecological consequences across parts of the region.

© 2018 Githumbi, Kariuki, Shoemaker, Courtney-Mustaphi, Chuhilla, Richer, Lane and Marchant. This study presents a multidisciplinary perspective for understanding environmental change and emerging socio-ecological interactions across the Amboseli region of southwestern Kenya. We focus on late Holocene (

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Most archaeological discussions of surplus production tend to focus either on its role in the emergence and maintenance of social complexity (whether among hunter-gatherers, farming communities or incipient states) or on the enabling properties of surplus as a basis for technological advances and aesthetic elaboration. Here, we offer a rather different perspective on surplus as an initiator of communitas and driver of ethnogenesis following a period of intense socio-ecological stress, environmental degradation and localized demographic decline during the nineteenth century. The particular case study concerns the Maa-language-speaking Ilchamus community who currently occupy areas around the southern end of Lake Baringo in the Central Rift Valley, Kenya. Drawing on a combination of new archaeological evidence, oral accounts and archival sources, the paper details the processes whereby destitute groups were drawn together into acts of surplus food production, initially of grain via the implementation of a system of irrigated agriculture and subsequently of cattle through the mobilization of kinship and related ties. In so doing, disparate older identities were abandoned or transformed and a different, unifying ethnicity–Ilchamus–emerged based on a new moral economy of shared prosperity.

In this paper, we review the potential of biocultural heritage in biodiversity protection and agricultural innovation in sub-Saharan Africa. We begin by defining the concept of biocultural heritage into four interlinked elements that are revealed through integrated landscape analysis. This concerns the transdisciplinary methods whereby biocultural heritage must be explored, and here we emphasise that reconstructing landscape histories and documenting local heritage values needs to be an integral part of the process. Ecosystem memories relate to the structuring of landscape heterogeneity through such activities as agroforestry and fire management. The positive linkages between living practices, biodiversity and soil nutrients examined here are demonstrative of the concept of ecosystem memories. Landscape memories refer to built or enhanced landscapes linked to specific land-use systems and property rights. Place memories signify practices of protection or use related to a specific place. Customary protection of burial sites and/or abandoned settlements, for example, is a common occurrence across Africa with beneficial outcomes for biodiversity and forest protection. Finally, we discuss stewardship and change. Building on local traditions, inclusivity and equity are essential to promoting the continuation and innovation of practices crucial for local sustainability and biodiversity protection, and also offer new avenues for collaboration in landscape management and conservation.

© 2016 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This paper considers the ecological residues of pastoralist occupation at the site of Maili Sita in Laikipia, central Kenya, drawing links with the archaeological record so as to contribute a fresh approach to the ephemeral settlement sites of mobile herding communities, a methodological aspect of African archaeology that remains problematic. Variations in the geochemical and micromorphological composition of soils along transects across the site are compared with vegetation distributions and satellite imagery to propose an occupation pattern not dissimilar to contemporary Cushitic-speaking groups further north. We argue that Maili Sita exemplifies the broad migratory and cultural exchange networks in place during the mid- to late second millennium AD, with pastoralist occupants who were both physically and culturally mobile.

UNLABELLED: In this article, we examine an assumption about the historic Swahili of the eastern African coast: that they were a maritime society from their beginnings in the first millennium C.E. Based on historical and archaeological data, we suggest that, despite their proximity to and use of the sea, the level of maritimity of Swahili society increased greatly over time and was only fully realized in the early second millennium C.E. Drawing on recent theorizing from other areas of the world about maritimity as well as research on the Swahili, we discuss three arenas that distinguish first- and second-millennium coastal society in terms of their maritime orientation. These are variability and discontinuity in settlement location and permanence; evidence of increased engagement with the sea through fishing and sailing technology; and specialized architectural developments involving port facilities, mosques, and houses. The implications of this study are that we must move beyond coastal location in determining maritimity; consider how the sea and its products were part of social life; and assess whether the marine environment actively influences and is influenced by broader patterns of sociocultural organization, practice, and belief within Swahili and other societies. [maritime, fishing and sailing, long-distance trade, Swahili, eastern Africa]. RESUMEN: En este artículo, evaluamos la hipótesis de que los pueblos Swahili de la costa oriental africana fueron una sociedad marítima a partir del primer milenio E.C. Basados en información histórica y arqueológica, proponemos que la asociación de la sociedad Swahili con el mar incrementó considerablemente con el tiempo y se manifestó de una forma significativa particularmente desde principios del segundo milenio E.C. Utilizando teorías recientes sobre maritimidad en otras áreas del mundo, así como investigaciones sobre los Swahili, discutimos tres temas que marcan las diferencias del nivel de orientación marítima de esta sociedad costera entre el primer y segundo milenio. Éstas son la variabilidad y discontinuidad en la localización y permanencia de los asentamientos; evidencia de una conexión mayor con el mar a través de la tecnología de pesca y navegación; y desarrollos arquitectónicos especializados que incluyen instalaciones portuarias, mezquitas, y casas. Las implicaciones de este estudio indican que debemos considerar otros aspectos de una sociedad aparte de su localización costera para determinar su maritimidad. Hay que considerar cómo el mar y sus productos son parte de la vida social y evaluar si existe una influencia recíproca entre el ambiente marítimo y los patrones de organización sociocultural, las prácticas, y las creencias de los Swahili y otras sociedades. [marítimo, pesca y navegación, comercio a larga distancia, Swahili, África Oriental].

This paper presents the results of a consensus-driven process identifying 50 priority research questions for historical ecology obtained through crowdsourcing, literature reviews, and in-person workshopping. A deliberative approach was designed to maximize discussion and debate with defined outcomes. Two in-person workshops (in Sweden and Canada) over the course of two years and online discussions were peer facilitated to define specific key questions for historical ecology from anthropological and archaeological perspectives. The aim of this research is to showcase the variety of questions that reflect the broad scope for historical-ecological research trajectories across scientific disciplines. Historical ecology encompasses research concerned with decadal, centennial, and millennial human-environmental interactions, and the consequences that those relationships have in the formation of contemporary landscapes. Six interrelated themes arose from our consensus-building workshop model: (1) climate and environmental change and variability; (2) multi-scalar, multi-disciplinary; (3) biodiversity and community ecology; (4) resource and environmental management and governance; (5) methods and applications; and (6) communication and policy. The 50 questions represented by these themes highlight meaningful trends in historical ecology that distill the field down to three explicit findings. First, historical ecology is fundamentally an applied research program. Second, this program seeks to understand long-term human-environment interactions with a focus on avoiding, mitigating, and reversing adverse ecological effects. Third, historical ecology is part of convergent trends toward transdisciplinary research science, which erodes scientific boundaries between the cultural and natural.