Articles Petek-Sargeant N, Lane PJ. in press 2021. Weathering Climate Change in Archaeology: Conceptual Challenges and an East African Case Study. Cambridge Archaeological Journal. p1-18. DOI: 10.1017/S0959774321000044 Boles O, Shoemaker A, Courtney Mustaphi CJ, Petek N, Ekblom A, Lane P. 2019. Historical ecologies of pastoralist overgrazing in Kenya: long-term perspectives on cause and effect. Human Ecology 47(3), 419–434. […]
Baringo Fieldwork Pt. 3 – The final step
Four months in the hot Baringo sun was not enough for the archaeological team of Baringo, so we returned for a third and final time. This time we wanted to blow everyone away with our discoveries and, by the end of the fieldwork in July, we surprised even ourselves. The fieldwork had everything: beautiful and […]
Excavations in Baringo, Fieldwork Pt. 2
From January to March, the extraordinary team exploring the archaeology around Lake Baringo set out on another adventure. Rather than endlessly walking through the landscape, discovering scatters of worked stone and shapely pottery, we returned to three sites we recorded during our previous fieldwork. The sites were subject to small excavations that uncovered a great […]
REAL attends ‘African Heritage Challenges: Development and Sustainability’
Paul Lane and Nik Petek attended the workshop ‘African Heritage Challenges: Development and Sustainability.’ It was hosted at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) in Cambridge from the 15th to the 16th of May. Paul Lane, who was invited as a plenary speaker, talked on the topic of ‘African […]
Archaeological fieldwork in Baringo Pt. 1
The REAL archaeological expedition to Lake Baringo began this autumn. From September to November 2014 a team of experienced researchers criss-crossed the southern Baringo lowlands looking for signs of past human occupation. In their quest for knowledge they traversed kilometres under the hot African sun, battling spitting cobras, gruesome thorn shrubs, and the ferocious (but […]
Obsidian tools
Obsidian is a volcanic extrusive rock with a glassy texture that is very hard and dense. The volcanic glass is usually black in colour, but it can also be dark green and brown. In rare cases trace elements of mineral crystals can cause obsidian to reflect light in various colours, or even the colour spectrum […]
First visit to Lake Baringo region
The Lake Baringo Basin is a place the vast majority of people have not heard of, and neither would I if it were not for the Tugen Hills, just west of the lake, famous for their hominin remains. If I had to describe it in a few words, I would say it is an area […]
ESR 1: Finding Past Human Landscapes: An archaeological and historical ecological investigation of the Lake Baringo Basin, Baringo District, Kenya
Fellow: Nik Petek, MA, PIfA Supervision: Prof Paul Lane Host Institution: Institute of Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala University, Sweden Duration: 4 years – starting in January 2014 Project description: ESR 1 focuses on the archaeology and the historical ecology of the Lake Baringo Basin, Kenya, between AD 900-1750, understanding past landscapes and socio-ecological resilience of past communities. […]
Nik Petek-Sargeant
Position Postdoctoral researcher Address McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research University of Cambridge Cambridge Zero Maxwell Centre University of Cambridge Biography Nik was an Early Stage Researcher at Uppsala University and part of the Resilience in East African Landscapes (REAL) Innovative Training Network. His PhD research focused on the human-environment relationships of the Ilchamus community in […]