An archaeological survey of the Lake Baringo lowlands 2014: Preliminary results

Postprint This is the accepted version of a paper published in Nyame Akuma. This paper has been peer-reviewed but does not include the final publisher proof-corrections or journal pagination. Access to the published version may require subscription. archaeological survey of the Lake Baringo lowlands was conducted by the author as part of a doctoral research project on the historical ecology of the Lake Baringo Basin, under the auspices of the Resilience in East African Landscapes Initial Training Network (REAL ITN; http://real-project.eu/). The REAL ITN is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions funded project (PI Professor Paul Lane, Uppsala University) investigating temporal, spatial and social dynamics of human-environment interactions over the last c. 500 years. Its geographical foci are the Eastern Rift Valley and Ewaso Basin in Central and North-Central Kenya, and the Pangani and Amboseli catchments in southeastern Kenya and northeastern Tanzania. Through a combination of palaeoenvironmental sciences, archaeology, human geography and anthropology, combined with agent-based modelling, the REAL ITN aims to understand the relations between past and current ecosystems, livelihoods, conservation and climate change in order to assess and reinforce the social and environmental resilience of the areas studied. An aim of the Lake Baringo archaeological project is to examine how human habitation affected and shaped the landscape and how past environments shaped the land-use of the Lake Baringo lowlands over the recent centuries. It also forms an archaeological investigation into Ilchamus oral history and their cultural and environmental resilience to the periodic droughts that the area experiences. The archaeological survey was organised with two goals in mind. The first goal was to record the effects of pastoralist homesteads (bomas in Kiswahili, Murua in Ilchamus) on the vegetation, soils, and landscape on decadal and centennial timescales to see how they deter, stifle or encourage the rehabilitation of the land decades after abandonment. A related research question is whether these abandoned bomas, which can become landscape features visible through differential vegetation growth, can be used as indicators of archaeological sites (see Causey, 2008). This complemented the second goal of the fieldwork, which is to expand knowledge of the Late Holocene archaeology of the Lake Baringo Basin and to identify sites for future excavations. The survey was focused on the lowlands just south of the lake, on the Sokotei, Kiserian, Lorrok and Logumukum localities (Figure 1). The area is currently occupied mainly by Ilchamus, a Maa speaking ethnic group with close cultural ties …