MIJ Davies BIEA Nairobi, 17/07/09 1 History and Archaeology in South and East Africa 500 Year Initiative Workshop July 2009 A view from the East: an interdisciplinary ‘historical ecology’ approach to a contemporary agricultural landscape in Northwest Kenya. Matthew Davies British Institute in Eastern Africa Key words: Historical Ecology; Eastern Africa; Landscape; Archaeology; Pokot Abstract: This paper draws on the authors own research into an agricultural landscape in Pokot, Northwest Kenya, to suggest new directions for interdisciplinary historical and archaeological research in Southern Africa. In particular the author identifies a landscape- based historical ecology approach as potentially useful and demonstrates its application with reference to the Pokot study. Introduction: The five hundred year initiative appears, in part, to be an attempt to breach a significant divide that has grown between the study of history and archaeology in southern Africa (Behrens and Swanepoel 2008; Bonner et al. 2008). As an archaeologist based in Eastern Africa, this divide is initially a little perplexing because for many decades there has been a thriving, if small, community of Eastern African researchers who have consistently aimed to bridge any such divide by concerning themselves with studies of the last 500-1000 years and making use of a wide range of archaeological, oral historical and palaeoenvironmental data. This interdisciplinary long durée approach to recent history is particularly apparent in the work of archaeologists such as John Sutton who focussed on the development of later Iron Age farming and herding communities in Kenya and Tanzania (Sutton 2004, 2000, 1998, 1993a, 1993b, 1987, 1986, 1985, 1984, 1978, 1973); Robert Soper who has looked at Marakwet agriculture in Kenya and at the vast Nyanga agricultural complex in Eastern Zimbabwe (Soper 2002, 2000, 1996, 1983), in much work conducted in the interlacaustrine region (Connah 1996; Reid 2003; Reid and Robertshaw 1987; Robertshaw 1994; Sutton 1993c, 1990), the southern Sudan (Mack and Robertshaw 1982) and more recently in the work of Paul Lane and others on communities and environments in Laikipia, central Kenya and Kondoa central Tanzania (Causey and Lane 2005; Lane et al. 2001, in press; Taylor et al 2005). Moreover, research with a similar approach (if not methodology) has been conducted by a wide range of historians, anthropologists and geographers (Anderson 2002, 1989, 1988; Lamphear 1976; Spear 1997; Spear and Waller 1993; Spencer 198; Johnson and Anderson 1988). Much of this Eastern African research has avoided a descent into preoccupations with ethnicity and the origins of certain archaeological sites and traditions often focussing instead on the technical development and operation of particular human ecosystems, most notably, political-economies, intensive agriculture, specialised herding and more recently complex ecological dynamics. These studies have also tended to baulk common trends derived from the implicitly neo-evolutionist archaeology of the 1970s and 1980s by focussing not on the ‘major transitions’ in human pre-history (as specified by Western thought), such as the