Talks and Events in Anthropology
Talk Title: Mobility, monumentality and seasonal-scale dietary strategies among eastern Africa’s first herders
Speaker's Bio: Dr. Chritz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of British Columbia. She is also the head of the light stable isotope facility housed within the Pacific Centre for Isotopic and Geochemical Research (PCIGR) at UBC. Dr. Chritz’s research focuses on mammalian diet and food webs through time, including humans and hominins, and her lab group focuses on using new and developing geochemical methods for exploring complex diet in the past.
Abstract: Pastoralists in eastern Africa are known for their specialized herding economies that include strategies to cope with seasonal resource availability. The region’s earliest evidence for livestock appears ~5,000 years ago in Kenya’s Turkana Basin amid major environmental and cultural changes. These earliest herders appeared as the climate was becoming more arid; Lake Turkana dropped by nearly 80 m from its early Holocene high stand around the time they moved into the basin. These early herders kept livestock, such as cattle and caprines, and also built megalithic cemeteries and/or ceremonial sites made of large basalt pillars. We are still exploring how people coped with these extreme environmental changes around Lake Turkana, but one area of exploration focuses on their dietary strategies. Zooarchaeological data, lipids preserved on pots and isotopic data from human remains indicates that people maintained a highly varied diet during this time. This is a very different dietary strategy than later pastoralists in eastern Africa, who were more specialized on livestock and their products. The nature of their dietary flexibility, such as seasonal-scale dietary strategies people may have employed, has been largely unknown. Using high resolution in situ geochemical methods, we can explore the degree of intra-annual dietary flexibility at the scale of the individual. We’ve now analyzed nineteen ancient individuals from around Lake Turkana for intra-tooth carbon (δ13C) and oxygen (δ18O) isotope profiles from fisher-forager-hunter-gatherers and the earliest herders in eastern Africa. Across both groups, carbon isotopic range is nearly 10‰, indicating a wide range of dietary strategies both before and after the transition to food production. However, oxygen isotopic ranges are narrower and show more correspondence between individuals. Across both groups, some individuals exhibit seasonal-scale carbon and oxygen isotopic variation, whereas others do not. These data show that early herders in eastern Africa did not exhibit uniform seasonal-scale eating and drinking behaviours, similar to the foragers who inhabited the basin before them, highlighting the individuality of this population’s dietary choices amidst mid-Holocene climatic and environmental changes.
Archaeology Day
