Late Quaternary Adaptations in the Central Rift Valley, Kenya

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This grant permits Dr. Ambrose and his colleagues to conduct one season of archaeological excavation at the site of Twilight Cave, located in the Naivasha Basin of Kenya's Rift Valley. Previous work at the site has revealed a long and well stratified sequence which extends from the Pleistocene (Ice Age) into recent times. Continued work at the site should provide evidence for: the antiquity of the Late Stone Age mesolithic tradition in East Africa and the subsistence base of these hunter.gatherers; the cultural and adaptive changes which accompanied the end of the Pleistocene; the age of the introduction of pottery and domestic animals. With this information it should be possible to determine the nature of subsistence and settlement patterns through time. These goals with be accomplished through excavation and collection of faunal, cultural and other biological remains. Stable carbon, nitrogen and oxygen isotope analyses of organic and inorganic fractions of bones and sediments should provide insight into environmental change over time. The question of how hunters and gatherers adapted to long term environmental fluxuation is of interest to anthropologists. Consideration of this requires a detailed and long term cultural sequence as well as good paleoenvironmental data. Sites which provide such information . as Twilight Cave does . are rare and therefore valuable. This research is important for the insights it will yield about how humans adapt at a simple level of technology. It is also important because of the scientific ties it will help build with Kenya. Dr. Ambrose has worked closely with Kenyan scientists, helped to train them, and included them in his research. Because of the important scientific materials which Kenya contains, it is valuable to strengthen this bilateral relationship.