Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Agriculture, Pastoralism And Environmental Change

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Ryan Szymanski, Ph.D. candidate at Washington State University, collaborating with archaeologists and paleoecologists in the United States and Kenya, will investigate the social and environmental conditions under which food production emerged as a viable, specialized lifeway in East Africa by integrating multi-proxy paleoecological and archaeological data sets. One important aspect of the origins of food production is increased human impact on local ecologies. The dynamic nature of relationships between humans and their physical and cultural environments throughout prehistory has come under increasing scientific scrutiny in recent years, and both archaeological and paleoecological studies are ideally suited to provide nuanced information detailing these processes. A major challenge in the reconstruction and interpretation of these contexts is having confidence in attributing the causes of environmental change to climatic and/or human activity. More detailed understanding of the ways in which human landscape alteration and climatic change have impacted environments on both local and regional scales over time will improve the ability of authorities, in both private and public spheres, to better construct long-term land management strategies in anticipation of future change. Primary project data will be disseminated to local and regional management entities to facilitate future resource stewardship, while a program of public presentations is designed to educate local communities about the importance of resource stewardship.. Processes of domestication are now understood to include not only individual plant and animal species, but entire ecological and geographic landscapes. Viewed from this perspective, human activities leading ultimately to highly specialized, "domesticated" plant and animal species are identifiable in environmental and temporal contexts far earlier than when they become visible as significant changes in physical form. Specifically, this project seeks to answer questions of when, and in what contexts, specialized food production emerges, as well as what strategies have been used to selectively modify floral and faunal presence on given landscapes. The Central RiftValley, Western Highlands, and Coastal regions of modern Kenya, contexts where these processes are not well documented, but which are reasonably well known archaeologically, will be the regional foci for this research. The researchers will examine changes through time in the pollen, fungal spore, and phytolith (diagnostic microscopic mineral accretions found among the cells of many plant groups) record preserved in wetland and lake catchments near known archaeological sites, and contextualize both types of data in order to better understand environmental changes associated with specific human activities.