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.