Emmanuel K. Ndiema

Pastoralists’ resilience and mitigation to climate change: Insights from the southeastern Turkana Basin

Today, thousands of households in east Africa depend on the widespread subsistence practice of pastoralism. However, in recent years, unpredictable climatic conditions, such as prolonged droughts and floods, have put thousands of lives at risk, especially those living in drier, more arid environments. Understanding how early herders and foragers coped with environmental transformation will clarify the issues of long-term pastoral resilience and provide lessons that can be applied to modern issues of climate change. These mechanisms are as relevant today as they were in the past, and will contribute to the well-being of an increasingly multicultural and globally connected modern society.

FULL TRANSCRIPT 

Good afternoon, everyone and I would like first of all to thank the organizers of this conference, for all the effort of putting this together in honor of Richard Leakey and this is really a very special moment for reflect on these issues and come up to see any way in which you can be able to carry to honor and carry that legacy. And my presentation even is a contribution from different colleagues that we work with in different sides, both in the east side and the west side of Lake Turkana. And when the name Richard Leakey is mentioned, it's not normally he wouldn't quickly associate it with the later prehistory more so of East Africa or Turkana basin because you only maybe consider associating it with a deep time. His paleoanthropology, the early hominid, early stone, all the early, the cool stuff, millions of years. But little is known that actually he did play a great role in encouraging research related to the later prehistory of Turkana Basin made in various ways by either encouraging or facilitating research, mainly focusing on the later prehistory of Turkana Basin. In the late sixties early seventies, Larry Robbins was in Lothagam excavating sites associated to the fisher, hunter-gatherer sites in Turkana. 

And that laid the foundation of understanding the kind of the later prehistory that we have in Turkana Basin. On the east side he was also very instrumental in foreseeing David Phillipson in excavating Lowazera in the seventies in just south towards Loiyangalani. And later again in the early seventies in facilitating John Bartheime in documenting the later prehistory on the east side, mainly Koobi Fora region in one within the Galana Boi beds in which John Bartheime was able to document the different kind of subsistence practices that are found within the last 10,000 years in Turkana Basin. So, all these laid the foundation of the later prehistory Turkana Basin that we see today in this landscape that is very resilient and is supporting very many pastoral communities in this area. So for myself as my encounter, luckily through different times when I was at the museum, but a very good encounter I reflect, I remember it's in 2008 during the Human Origins conference in Ileret in which, Mzee as he was we fondly referred to him to some of us is because during this conference he was able to pull aside and actually told me no uncertain times. 

Like you need to in his own words,” Chukua na mikono yenu” hold the collaboration and have meaningful collaboration with colleagues in which you can be able to undertake that, undertake your research and collaborate with the colleagues in a very meaningful way. So those are the words that I carry up today that whenever I undertake any collaboration that be meaningful and very respectful way and that for me is a very eye opener that I carried up to today. So I study my research that I present to each about pastoralism mainly maybe because part of the thing I come from a pastoral community, so it's something that is very dear to me. But pastoralism is a very resilient subsistence practice globally sustaining millions of livelihoods in different kind of places across the world in more so in more fragile and very unstable landscapes. But some of the disease landscapes actually today, especially in Turkana Basin, is come under very much threat is under threat. 

We didn't know from oil exploration, hydro for hydrocarbon extraction, wind power generation and also the conservancies are getting everywhere. So threatening this age old lively tradition and doubt. And this all is happening without long-term knowledge of pastoralists land use patterns. How these pastoralists use the landscape, how can that inform the present challenges of conservation, oil extraction and development? So, all this actually is now the pressures that face the present day pastoralist communities mainly in Turkana Basin. So, for this presentation we look at the longer time, we take a long-term perspective on climate change and looking at the risks, human economic and cultural responses and rather the current environmental changes, for example the lake level shifts and the effect on communities, especially in Lake Turkana. And then look at pastoralism as a resilient but a threatened way of life. We know that actually the last 15,000 years, the big questions that we ask the climate has been changing very rapidly and this corresponding change in subsistence strategies associated with it. 

And one of the things that what are the new knowledge and future research directions that we can be able to incorporate as we understand these challenges of climate change through time. Especially with regard to the African humid period and how did that affect under hunter-gatherers and the inception of early pastoralists in Turkana Basin and as my colleague Dr. Sonia Harmand mentioned this morning is about the effect or among the first things or the hallmarks of Turkana Basin is also having the earliest evidence of pastoralism in Eastern and southern Africa. So, it's a very key area among the first, the cradle of innovation, cradle of humankind, also the cradle of pastoralism or the cradle of managed food production. So what is the relationship between the past and the present, especially having this knowledge about the past pastoral communities and the present day pastoral communities that inhabit this landscape. Mainly we look at it from the changing the last 10,000, the change in the Congo and the Congo rainfall belt and able to move as it's moved, it's created very dry, the wet-humid conditions, the lake level was very high as seed can document from the different kind of size locations that are associated with among the early Holocene sites, about 10,000, 10,000 years to about 6,000 and all these are very far off from the present lake. 

The lake was very high and actually spilling over into Nile drainage basin. So how did these people adapt these conditions during the African humid period about 15,000 years ago as there was more rainfall, high lake levels, vegetation changes, especially the hunting and gathering communities. How was that conditions changed through time and what are the human response to that time? And my colleagues Steven Goldstein actually has looked at it from a different perspective, analyzing the different archeological faunal remains that have been found at the site in Lothagam and Lokam whereby he has created a very good change in subsistence analysis in the change of subsistence practices. Looking at the local and regional environmental fluctuate, different environment fluctuates at different scales, and this is very important to understand as the environment change. Even as a very place such as Lake Turkana basin, there are this very localized microenvironments that are very key in terms of promoting the local resources and therefore this becomes very important as the environment changes and provides very good resilient or refuge for pastoral communities because of the little microenvironments that are viable. 

So it was not uniform, but the role of these small microenvironments is very key and shifting in leading technologies to respond to local changes and the cultural and technological innovation as they respond. And he was able to create this very document, the different kind of subsistence strategies that change through time in Lothagam. One of the critical things also in Turkana Basin especially relating to the later prehistory is the burial of these megalithic, we call them pillar sites. These are megalithic structures that actually are the different areas across the landscape, and they're found within both the east side and the west side of Lake Turkana Basin. And we have studied this both in the east side and the west side documenting very elaborate burial traditions that actually these sites who are actually buried more than between 500 and 500 people actually buried. These important pillars in the landscape actually built by early pastoralist showing a place of commemoration who across the landscape and they're very key therefore in trying to understand the pastoralist resilience and way of life in this dry arid landscape. 

And because of the kind of archeological ethics of not trying to expose the entire thing, some of the technical uses ground penetrating rather to understand the burials and we estimate there are about 500 to 1000 burials that are available that are within this landscape. And there are many more in different designs and different shapes all across the landscape. And there are a lot of elements of on ornamentation and aesthetics, especially in ostrich eggshells, ostrich shell beads. And these are not only, we don't look at them but only as aspect of ornamentation but also aspect of social connection, creating social connection. And it goes beyond ostrich eggshell beads whereby we have these very elaborately done stone beads using different raw material amazonite, quartz, chalcedony among others. They're all very elaborately done and due time. And these are also found within these burial sites showing that kind of form of very elaborate resilience that are utilized by these early communities. 

So, from all this work we have been able to understand what are the changes we've been able to understand the different kind of locations of this side both in the east side of this pastoral site, the east side and on the west side. And from that we are able to understand now what are the future directions that we want to take in terms of understanding pastoral mobility. And we look at pastoral mobility in three dimensions. One of the dimensions is human mobility, trying to understand human, how people move across the landscape. And my colleagues in Anika Jensen are using strontium isotopes to understand how humans from tooth enamel to understand how humans move across different geological provinces or light isotopes to understand how big they move across different environments. We also look at livestock mobility, a movement of livestock across different geological provinces a bit more. 

So, cows, goat and sheep and then material mobility. And in regard to human mobility, we look at the teeth and how they're able because they're able to capture that kind of up to the age of 13 about the different kind of landscape that people are taking and bringing water from. We also look at livestock mobility in terms of where the livestock are going across and grazing, understand the different kind of environments across different environments across different geological provinces that we can able to understand. And here we compare data from different, this is from modern pastoralists use of landscape and then we'll see how it compares, how it compares with that of human beings. And this is human mobility, efficient diet, dietary, variation in diet and how they kind of try based strontium and isotopes. And these are the kind of directions that we want to understand the different mobility because the big question that we are trying to understand, how was pastoralism initiated in Turkana Basin? 

It was in being a background of increased climatic variability where the environment was wet was increasingly dry and it's unclear on whether the early pastoralists were new populations that moved into Turkana Basin or was it the original hunger gatherers that actually shifted their subsistence practices and started practicing pastoralism or was it a mixture of both? Understanding these questions are critical in able to understand today, challenges that actually facing the pastoral communities across the landscape. So, we also look at material mobility and some of the hacks that I've done is actually obsidian sourcing, understand the different sources of obsidian and matching it to the archeological finds and the geological sources and archeological artifacts that are found among within the Holocene sites. And some of them actually point at very different size that have been going all the way to Ethiopia. I we'll see shortly then other kind of material is clay sourcing. 

We need to understand the pottery ceramic tradition starting from 9,000 up to 3000 of the late Holocene. Where are these, is there changes in terms of the ceramic sourcing? Where are they getting this clay from? Are they new materials that are coming in or are they coming in as finished products? Understanding this kind of exchange networks is critical in understanding whether these were aspects of exchange networks existing through across the landscape or it's just a matter of ranging patterns moving across the landscape in wider areas as opposed to just getting the things when they're finished products. So those are some of the things they're doing. And the data from obsidian sourcing actually shows that we have different sources old, some of the sources are in the Suguta Valley south, some are in within the Ethiopian Highlands. And when we plot those sources, we find actually that they match some of the sources that can match the sources in Ethiopia, some match way far south as far as 250 kilometers. 

So there's a wide range in terms of obsidian. So the next thing that we are going to do is to analyze the clay sourcing and that's the project we are going to undertake this coming summer to be able to understand the different kind of clay sources that exists because we look at this in terms of to understand the distribution of sites as a way of building resilience and risk avoidance. And when we look at this in terms of the lake distribution, we have these upwelling areas and if you look at the archeological distribution of this archeological, if we look at the distribution of these archeological sites, you find that they fall within those kind of core, the upwelling areas and it's within these upwelling areas that actually we find that and we compare that with this modern pastoralists use of the landscape. This is based on a GPS livestock across the move landscape. 

So these upwelling areas become very critical area in terms of providing not only fishing grounds but also good ground areas for grazing. And now coming back to the modern pastoral communities, we look at them now to also to understand how can we be able to understand the coupled and natural systems, how the natural affect the human and how the human affects them. So we all of this in totality trying to understand issues of wealth, precipitation, water availability for among biomass and how that integrate affecting the humans among the current capacity, stock numbering, residential mobility among other things and energetics. So, we bring this together to look at all now from a human health point of view and stand for example the water insecurity, the high temperature and water issues, how does that affect the health of the community living in this dry marginal landscape and how in terms of also energetic the energy expenditure during the day. 

So we are looking at it from that total point of view in terms of how the natural and the cultural affect one another and from this week can be able to understand what are these changes that affect human health as things are changing and is there any other inference evidence of environmental change? So here we also integrate in local ecological knowledge and understanding pastoralists mobility.  And this the map here is all different areas that are utilized by the Daasanach community in the east side of Lake Turkana whereby they demarcated the landscape was showing the different areas that they use during the wet season, the dry season, at the extreme dry season when it's very dry. More recently, as I said, we are GPS the animals and we are able to track their movements across the landscape. You well know more recently we have had a very severe drought. 

We just emerging from very severe drought and pastoralists lost lots and lots of livestock. And from that we only had one herder who had one of our GPS livestock and he was the only one whose cows did not die. We lost all the cows that we had, we had GPS, but only this one farm herder is the one that we did not lose his cows. So when we retrieved the GPS and followed the data, we found okay that during all this time, most of his time is the one in reddish. He spent it way out in the volcanic margins way outside the basin. And when we compare that with the local traditional knowledge in grazing patterns, we find actually those are the areas that are listed as a use that areas that you can graze during very dry time that when things are really bad and that is the only way that he was able to keep his livestock and come back. That the issues of in community violence and struggles notwithstanding, he was able to have his livestock, his cows as suppose when everyone else lost completely lost their livestock. 

So this knowledge, understanding the knowledge and his livestock is key, especially when we go now to issues that I mentioned at the beginning when we get into issues, issues of extraction, of resources within this landscape, emergence of conservancies among other things. So as a critical that we understand and we have that long-term knowledge of pastoralists, right? Learn resilience and use the landscape from the cultural record, moving that into the future. It's from this therefore that we look at it as we reflect on Mzee’s life, we look at infrastructure, he was able to put together starting from actually the National Museums of Kenya. Actually I re touched the other day when Louise in her presentation showed the beginning of these offices that we hold today when they were under construction and the record and how consistently Mzee has continued, continued building infrastructure Koobi Fora base camp. It's there today supporting research now we have Turkana Basin Institute in ileret these very remote areas and very challenging areas to do that there is infastructure. 

So the goal as we continue building, as we honor Mzee in his legacy, whatever is important that we build infrastructure to support research both in terms of technology transfer capacity building, that we are able to support research. Not only you can't be doing cool research, but when it is not supported by infrastructure to support that research on the ground but not having infrastructure miles and miles away. And that is something that we learned very well during the pandemic that we were actually able to graduate three PhD students who are able to want to take their research data collection remotely just because of the infrastructure. There were resources they had invested on some infrastructure and capacity building at the museum and we were able to collect the data consult on day-to-day basis with them and they collected the data, finished up their dissertation under very difficult circumstances. 

So as we honor Mzee, we remember this infrastructure and this legacy of building infrastructure that we can be able to continue. Therefore, as we look at this pastoralists resilience and risk mitigation involved issues of intensification, the first subsistence basis as we see from pastoral communities from fishing, hunting and gathering, and also keeping their livestock against these new changes. Social connections as we see from the 10 different ornamentation as mentioned, very important local ecological conditions. On a wider level there were these present challenges. Actually climate change call for a clear understanding of mechanism of resilience, risk mitigation, cultural contact, influence and change through time. These mechanisms are relevant today as they were in the past and continue to play a critical role in what is increasingly multicultural and globally connected society. Asanteni sana!

View all Archaeology videos