Fires, Flakes And Flooding: Archaeological, Palaeoenvironmental And Ethnohistorical Survey In The Lower Omo Valley: The Dirikoro-Dewachaga Findings.

The Lower Omo Valley in Southwestern Ethiopia has been subject to diverse environmental fluctuations over the long-term and, as such, provides an excellent setting to study the synergy between the environment and anthropogenic agency through time. This paper will describe some recent research into the historical ecology of a region of the Lower Omo inhabited by the Mursi people. The results of archaeological, palaeoenvironmental and ethnohistorical investigations will be presented, principally relating to the
Dirikoro-Dewachaga area, and the fruitful interplay of these multiple lines of evidence highlighted and contextualised. The changing evidence for bush encroachment, settlement and subsistence dynamics, ritual intensification, and fire and other forms of environmental modelling will be documented.