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The Contours of Vegetation Change and Human Agency in Eastern Africa's Great Lakes Region: ca. 2000 BC to ca. AD 10001

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

David Lee Schoenbrun
David Lee Schoenbrun*
Affiliation:
University of Georgia
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Extract

Elsewhere I have set forth a basic outline for charting histories of vegetation change through the use of paleoenvironmental data (Schoenbrun 1991). This essay builds on the previous one by laying out the contours of vegetation change and human agency in the Great Lakes region (Map 1) over the roughly three millennia after ca. 2000 BC.

The history of the vegetation in eastern Africa's Great Lakes region brings into focus several important features of long-term environmental change—human action, climatic shift, and internal successional patterns. The primary sources for this history come from a variety of published palynological and limnological studies from Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zaire. Perhaps the most rewarding data for reconstructing climatic and vegetational change come from palynological studies. Pollen studies often reflect detailed changes in the constitution of plant communities, and their value for reconstructing the vegetational and climatic contexts for Holocene human history has provoked the development of a rigorous method for their analysis. Contemporary studies of plant community succession and human-vegetation relationships are a secondary source for the history of land clearance in the Great Lakes region. These works provide a means to determine the different imprints of human and climatic action on the paleoenvironmental record.

In this study I combine the full range of paleoenvironmental evidence to reconstruct the form and pace of vegetation change. I focus on a part of eastern Africa famous for its great ecological diversity. One of the rewards of this endeavor is to demonstrate to paleoecologists, archaeologists, and historians alike the value of a truly interdisciplinary approach to environmental change.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 21 , 1994 , pp. 269 - 302
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1994

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Footnotes

1.

I would like to thank Kearsley Stewart, Christopher Ehret, Merrick Posnansky, Hartmut Walter, and Emile Roche for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Errors of interpretation are mine. Research on which parts of this work is based was supported by the Social Science Research Council and Fulbright-Hays.

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