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Resilience in East African Landscapes

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Project Overview – Resilience in East African Landscapes (REAL)

Project summary The strong temporal dynamics of the East African landscape and natural-resource distributions have always encouraged people to innovate and adapt to changing conditions. However, the realities of current social and environmental changes are occurring at unprecedented rates and amplitudes. Increasing population growth, changes in patterns of land tenure, industrialization, weak systems of governance, […]

Beny Lilawola joins ARCC

ARCC project members have expanded to include Beny Lilawola, an MA student in the Department of History at the University of Dar es Salaam. Lilawola is supervised by former REAL project ESR Dr Maxmillian Chuhila. Lilawola has long been interested in how cash crop production in the colonial period transformed agricultural livelihoods and landscapes throughout Tanzania. […]

Participatory mapping of bio-cultural heritage hotspots in western Serengeti

Dr Anna Shoemaker, ARCC post-doc has just spent the last month touring around western Serengeti visiting heritage sites in collaboration with local partners in an effort to document and understand the historical ecology of this incredibly varied landscape. The range of sites encountered was vast and included German colonial communication posts, hand-dug 19th/20th century wells, […]

Vegetation surveys in Serengeti

The ARCC project has been ramping it’s archaeological activity in western Serengeti this past month, doing participatory mapping and surveys throughout the region. The ARCC project’s archaeologist post-doc Anna Shoemaker was thrilled to be joined in the field from November 6-11 by Professor Tamera Minnick and Richard Alward, both of whom are currently visiting scholars at […]

ARCC Imagines Serengeti with Jan Bender Shetler

ARCC project member Anna Shoemaker recently joined Jan Bender Shetler and Jonathon Schramm on an excursion around western Serengeti. Shetler is a professor of history at Goshen College who has enjoyed a long career researching oral traditions, social identity, landscape and gendered memory and environmental history in the Mara region. Jonathon Schramm is an associate professor of […]

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. […]

ESR 2: On the periphery of living memory in the Amboseli basin human settlement and landscape interaction c. 1700-1950

Early Stage Researcher:  Anna Shoemaker Supervision:  Paul Lane Host Institution:  Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala University Duration:  4 years – starting from 1 January 2014   The Amboseli basin in southern Kenya is considered to be a landscape traditionally inhabited by pastoralists, and the Maasai are identified as the indigenous people of the basin. Yet, today […]

ESR 3: Landscape and environmental change

Fellow:  Geert van der Plas Supervision:  Dirk Verschuren Host Institution:  Limnology Unit, Department of Biology, Ghent University Duration:  3 years – beginning December 2013 Project description: “Millennial scale landscape and environmental change in the northern Rift Valley and Mount Kilimanjaro regions” In my project I will reconstruct past interactions of humans with their environment, driven […]

ESR 4: Long-term ecosystem dynamics and societal interactions in the Amboseli and Mau ecosystems from swamp sediments

            ESR 4 – Esther Githumbi SUPERVISOR – Dr. Rob Marchant INSTITUTION – University of York I am based at The York Institute for Tropical Ecosystems (KITE), University of York. KITE works across Eastern Africa to understand ecosystem patterns and processes, how these interact with environment, biotic and human populations. The region encompasses some […]

ESR 5: Soil erosion in the Lake Baringo basin, Kenya

Aynalem Degefa The main target of my PhD research at the University of Ghent, Belgium, is to reconstruct and quantify the rates of soil erosion in the Lake Baringo basin, Kenya. The Lake Baringo landscape has been severely affected by land degradation, especially during the past couple of centuries as environmental stresses mounted in relation […]

ESR 6: Landscape Dynamics, Struggle for Livelihood or Survival Strategies: A History of Kilimanjaro Lowlands 1850 to 2010

Project Bio: This PhD project studies ways in which the people of Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, have been dynamic in using and coping with changing availability of ecosystem services and provisions. It is my interest to study the pattern and nature of the adaptations of mountain peoples in interacting with adjacent lowland landscapes. These two landscapes, highlands […]

ESR 7: Turning conflict into coexistence: cross-cutting ties and institutions in the agro-pastoral borderlands of Lake Naivasha basin, Kenya.

ESR 7:  Turning conflict into coexistence: cross-cutting ties and institutions in the agro-pastoral borderlands of Lake Naivasha basin, Kenya Fellow: Eric Mutisya Kioko Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Michael Bollig, University of Cologne, Germany; Prof. David Anderson, Warwick University, UK. Host Institution: Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Cologne Project Period: 3 years from 1st […]

ESR 9: Struggle and conflict over Resources in the Central Rift Valley

Christine Adongo’s PhD project targets two locations in the central Rift Valley, Olkaria in Nakuru County, and Suswa in Narok and Kajiado Counties. These areas are occupied by the once nomadic pastoral group, the Masai, known for having huge herds of livestock. Historically Masai had solely depended upon these herds for sustenance. The central Rift […]

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REAL is a Marie Curie Actions InnovativeTraining Network (ITN), funded by the European Commission under the Seventh Framework Programme.

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Prof. Paul Lane
Department of Archaeology and Ancient History,
Uppsala University, and
Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge

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