Mary Elizabeth Prendergast

MARY PRENDERGAST, Rice University, Houston, Texas, was approved funding in April 2023 to aid research on “Reassessing Pastoralist Foodways in Ancient Eastern Africa.” Millions of Africans today rely on livestock herding, a resilient lifeway that enables people to survive when climate change threatens food security and social stability. Pastoralist systems have sustained African communities for seven millennia, yet archaeologists often lack data with which to reconstruct ancient pastoralist foodways and, by extension, mobility, settlement, and other aspects of social life. This project reconstructs foodways during the Pastoral Neolithic era, focusing on the 3,000-year-old site of Luxmanda in Tanzania, with additional analysis at the newly discovered site of Laja. Funding supported post-excavation analysis of faunal remains, as well as artifacts that speak to culinary practices and/or social networks (ceramics, lithics, ostrich eggshell beads, and bone tools). Zooarchaeological research revealed that the animal-based portions of diets at Luxmanda and Laja are dominated by livestock, with important differences in herding and slaughtering strategies between these sites and in comparison to regional archaeological and ethnographic data. Luxmanda’s pastoralists were also regularly hunting, and we leveraged multiple methods to differentiate among related wild and domesticated species. Foundational zooarchaeological analysis provides robust points of comparison with regional Pastoral Neolithic and Iron Age sites, and supports biomolecular research that will further understanding of ancient mobility, herd management, and culinary practices.