Mobile or Sedentary: Proxies for Movement and Cultural Transmission from Holocene Prehistory in Northern Kenya

This paper aims to illuminate and explore the coupled nature resource
availability, degree of tethering and mobility for ancient fishing, forager and
herders during the Mid Holocene in Northern Kenya. Mobility patterning is
explored through movement proxies such as resource distribution, cultural
transmission of style and technology, and subsistence choice and intensification

In Eastern Africa the record of food production, changes in subsistence
and resource intensification show differing trajectories from global patterns.
In East Africa people used aquatic fauna and developed or adopted the use of
ceramics before managed food production. Later, at about 6-4 kbp, pastoral
economies spread south from the Sahara through the region. Both instances
of subsistence change and resource intensification entailed major changes in
settlement and mobility patterns. But it is not just an order of magnitude
shifting of sedentary to mobile (or from mobile to settled but a complex
interdependent linkage of resources and subsistence economics against a
background of climatic change and increased climatic variability.

We will report on our field studies from Lake Turkana on resource distribution,
raw material sources for the manufacture of stone tools, stylistic
and technology geographic variation in worked bone tools and land use patterning
over a regional geography and through time. The will compare modern
pastoralist land use with our emerging understanding of pastoralist and
foraging patterns of land use through history. Findings will demonstrate the
diversity and mobility patterns among Holocene fishing, foraging, and
herder adaptations.

Keywords: Holocene, Lake Turkana, Fishers, Herders, Pastoralism, Mobility.