ARSI - Archaeological Research on Scales of Integration of High-Altitude Ecozones within Prehistoric Land Use Systems

• Applicant: Dr. Goetz Ossendorf
• Subject Area: Prehistory and World Archaeology
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 537285561

This archaeological project comprehensively reassesses tropical high-altitude mountain systems' roles in the prehistoric African past. According to demographic models, past climate changes were ultimately responsible for creating and transforming human habitats, shifting human connectivity and gene flow, and deeply structured subpopulations across the continent. While this explains the current archaeological, fossil, and genetic evidence in general, the details of the underlying processes are largely unknown. In particular, identifying environmental refugia and human migration corridors forms a much-debated issue, but conclusive results are still needed. In light of Ethiopia's unique ecological and topographical conditions, we argue that mountain systems – including high-altitude regions – have played a much more significant role in human land use systems of mobile hunter-gatherers in the past than previously thought. As an innovative approach, this project uses aspects of the archaeological record as a proxy for mobility processes that have operated in the past on different temporal, spatial, and social scales. Each scale has a unique coupling mechanism linking human mobility and ecozone integration, ranging from supra-regional demographic expansions/contractions via regional, pan-ecological networks enabling cultural transmission to small-scale subsistence circuits. This approach allows for a straightforward hypothesis-driven procedure, manifesting itself by testable predictions and permitting the reconstruction of different scenarios of human land use in space and time. Fieldwork (surveys and excavations) in the hitherto unexplored high-altitude Arsi Mountains (Oromia Province, southeastern Ethiopia) will produce new and urgently needed data for reconstructing past human lifeways in high altitudes. Methodologically, the analyses embrace sediment analyses of stratified deposits (soil biogeochemical, micromorphological, sedimentological studies, and radiocarbon dating). The cultural material will be studied by lithic analyses (geochemistry, use wear & residue studies, and lithic technology), archaeobotanical analyses (anthracology), and faunal analyses (zooarchaeology and ZooMS). These studies will be accompanied by a detailed review and synthesis of the archaeological record of the Horn of Africa, flowing into a spatiotemporally explicit model of past human land use within the last ca. 50,000 years. In the future, the archaeological results obtained here have the potential to be aligned in depth with climate and environmental data, notably – once these are available – at synchronized scales of analyses investigated here.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Dr. Minassie Girma Tekelemariam