MILK-BASED PASTORALISM IN EASTERN AFRICA: RESILIENCE AND RESISTANCE
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 2021-01-29

By favoring the survival of females for their potential to rebuild herds after catastrophic losses, African savannan and sahelian pastoralists were probably obligated to opt for dairying, as opposed to carnivorous livestock management, as a central animal subsistence adaptation. Milk based pastoralism can thus be viewed not simply as a subsistence choice but as the dry-land adaptation that offers herds and humans the greatest resilience in the face of the climatic perturbations typical of those zones. Molecular evidencefrom both ceramics and human genomics suggests not only the antiquity of dairy pastoralism’s emergence in the grasslands of the then-green Sahara, as well as its independent, indigenous development during an epoch when the Sahara was beginning to dry. Recent zooarchaeological evidence from Kenya suggests that stone using, “Savanna Pastoral Neolithic” pastoralists were acquainted with iron tools well before their widespread adoption. This presentation makes the case that East African pastoralists may have resisted incorporation into contemporaneous orbits of iron-producing and iron-using migrants into the Lake Victoria region. By remaining with a largely stone-based technology, rather than readily adopting iron, as was the case with many hunter-gathers in Africa, pastoralists would have been able to maintain their traditional property relations and axes of social power.


Author(s): Gifford-Gonzalez, Diane (University of California, Santa Cruz)