Research Projects
My current research is organized into four regional collaborations. Together, these projects use evidence of past human-animal relationships to track cultural and environmental changes in Africa since the Last Glacial Maximum.
Project regions, at a glance:
Southern Africa: The spread of farming and rise of early cities, from Great Zimbabwe to the Bantu Expansions.
Eastern Uganda: Long-term fishing and foraging economies around Lake Victoria and their relevance for conservation today.
Southern Somalia: Hunter-gatherer innovation and resilience in inselberg habitats during a period of major climatic fluctuations.
Central Sudan: Holocene rainfall shifts, the reoccupation of the Sahara, and early food production in the Middle Nile Valley.
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Southern Africa
Zooarchaeological research on changing food systems and urbanism at Great Zimbabwe and beyond.
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Eastern Uganda
Long-term human-lakeshore interactions, bridging Holocene fisher-foragers to ongoing heritage and conservation work.
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Southern Somalia
Later Stone Age hunter-gatherer resilience in semi-arid tropical environments, highlighting deep human legacies in an understudied landscape.
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Central Sudan
Interdisciplinary research on population expansions and the transition to herding in unpredictable environments.
Southern Africa
Time frame: the last ~2,000 years.
Themes: Early food production, urbanism, Bantu political economies.
Projects: Great Zimbabwe and New Bantu Mosaics
Role: Work Package Lead (Zooarchaeology and Biomarkers)
I lead the zooarchaeological, isotopic, and aDNA components of two collaborative projects that investigate how Bantu-speaking communities transformed southern African landscapes over the last two millennia. By centering local traditions and worldviews, this work challenges Eurocentric narratives about hierarchy and “progress” that have fundamentally shaped the ways we understand the African past.
Great Zimbabwe Hill
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At Great Zimbabwe, I use faunal remains to re-examine food systems and social organization at one of Africa’s best-known precolonial cities. Earlier interpretations imagined a rigid social hierarchy, by which elites monopolized material wealth and prestige goods, including meat. This model reflected imported European ideas about resources and status.
My analyses of faunal assemblages from multiple residential areas show widespread meat feasting, with little evidence of the centralized control of resources. These patterns point to community-oriented food sharing and networks of reciprocity that better reflect local Bantu approaches to social and economic organization.
Ongoing work combines cattle mortality profiles, stable isotopic analysis, and cementum annuli studies to reconstruct slaughter seasonality and provisioning strategies. This integrated approach reveals how cattle ownership and community-centered meat distribution supported and maintained early processes of urbanization in Africa.
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As work package leader for the New Bantu Mosaics Project, I coordinate zooarchaeological research investigating how Bantu-speaking farmers transformed southern African landscapes over two millennia. Our team uses archaeological and bioarchaeological datasets from across the region to track long-term processes of cultural change, animal translocations, and technological innovations.
My contribution integrates ancient DNA, stable isotope data, and zooarchaeological methods to trace how human-animal relationships changed as farming communities engaged with local hunter-gatherers and pastoralists. By foregrounding Bantu understandings of landscape, ancestry, and animal care, this project both contributes to regional heritage work and pushes methodological debates about how we study complex social transformations at scale.
Eastern Uganda
Time frame: ~8,000-1,500 years ago
Themes: lakeshore adaptations, hunter-gatherer variability, conservation baselines
Projects: Kansyore and Lakeshore Ecologies Through Time
Roles: Co-PI and Zooarchaeologist
Between 2016-2018, I co-directed fieldwork with Professor Ruth Tibesasa in a previously unexplored area in eastern Uganda, identifying several new Stone Age and Iron Age sites along the Lake Victoria shoreline. Excavations at Namundiri A, Namaboni B, and Lugala A recovered extensive Holocene assemblages that provided a long-term record of cultural and environmental change in one of Africa’s most densely populated regions.
Lake Victoria, Uganda
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The Lake Victoria Basin preserves some of East Africa's earliest pottery and evidence for highly specialized fishing economies beginning in the early Holocene. These innovations are associated with the Kansyore Later Stone Age tradition, a distinctive delayed-return foraging system characterized by seasonal landscape use, intensive fishing, and extensive ceramic production.
My zooarchaeological and chronological analyses have documented a major economic reorganization around 5,000 years ago, when Kansyore communities reduced their reliance on lakeshore habitats and developed more specialized river-based fishing strategies. This shift broadly coincided with increased aridity and the arrival of herders and farmers in the region, highlighting how environmental change and cultural contact drove adaptation among local hunter-gatherer groups.
This ongoing research challenges assumptions that hunter-gatherers were inherently vulnerable to Holocene climate change, instead revealing flexible strategies that facilitated resilience in a dynamic lakeshore environment. It also demonstrates a dynamic process of iteration among Lake Victoria ecosystems, technological innovations, settlement choices, and subsistence.
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Professor Tibesasa and I are developing an interdisciplinary project to excavate additional threatened lakeshore sites before industrial development destroys them. This rescue archaeology will recover crucial cultural information while supporting grassroots heritage initiatives and local community engagement .
Faunal assemblages recovered from our excavations offer pre-disturbance ecological baselines for Lake Victoria, which has been dramatically transformed since the introduction of Nile perch in the 1950s and subsequent collapse of native tilapia species. By documenting past biodiversity and fishing practices, this work provides essential long-term context for conservation planning and debates about sustainable futures for the lake its surrounding communities
Southern Somalia
Time frame: ~26,000-6,000 years ago
Themes: hunter-gatherer resilience, inselberg ecologies, cooperative hunting
Projects: Somali Buur and Paleoclimate Projects
Roles: Co-PI, Zooarchaeologist, and Stable Isotope Analyst
I study zooarchaeological collections from Later Stone Age hunter-gatherer sites in southern Somalia, providing rare insights into human adaptations over a 20,000-year period of dramatic climatic fluctuation. Guli Waabayo, Gogoshiis Qabe, and the Rifle Range Site were excavated in the 1980s before the Somali Civil War and represent some of the only archaeological datasets available from a region profoundly affected by decades-long conflict.
Buur Heybe inselberg cluster, Somalia (image © Steven A. Brandt)
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All three sites lie near granitic inselbergs (buur), rocky outcrops that sustain more diverse plant and animal communities than the surrounding arid plains. Occupations spanning the Last Glacial Maximum through the Holocene document human survival strategies under conditions ranging from hyper-aridity to wetter, more stable climates.
My analysis of over 130,000 bones from Guli Waabayo reveals striking continuity in hunting strategies across 20,000 years. Despite major climate shifts, inhabitants maintained an intensive focus on dik-dik, small-bodied antelope (3-6 kg) adapted to inselberg habitats. Evidence for mass kill-off events suggests cooperative net-hunting, indicating that organized group labour and complex social coordination were central to resilience in the semi-arid landscape.
This work shows that cooperative hunting in the Horn of Africa extends several millennia earlier than previously recognized. With my Ugandan research, it also challenges narratives that portray hunter-gatherers as especially vulnerable to environmental disruptions. Instead, this work emphasizes sophisticated, long-term strategies for maintaining food security and social cohesion.
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Collaborative oxygen isotopic analyses of ancient warthog tooth enamel from southern Somalia reconstruct changes in rainfall amount and seasonality through time. These data reveal drier, more seasonal conditions during the Late Pleistocene followed by more consistent Holocene rainfall, providing a locally-based climatic framework for interpreting shifting subsistence strategies. By integrating faunal, isotopic, and chronological evidence, this work links human decision-making at inselberg sites to broader atmospheric and hydrological changes.
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Beyond reconstructing ancient lifeways, this research documents a deep archaeological record in a region where heritage has been severely threatened. Ongoing syntheses draw together multiple analytical threads to rebuild and preserve knowledge about communities who occupied the landscape thousands of years ago. This work ensures that Somalia’s ancient human legacy remains part of global conversations about resilience, landscape, and environmental change.
Central Sudan
Time frame: ~12,000-5,000 years ago
Themes: African Humid Period, environmental change, economic transitions
Projects: Shaqadud and Sabaloka Projects
Role: Zooarchaeologist
I collaborate with an international team investigating how societies in Sudan's Middle Nile Valley responded to Holocene climate fluctuations, including the transition from hunting and gathering to early herding. This work addresses fundamental questions about how people navigated major environmental and cultural changes in one of earliest centers of food production.
Shaqadud Box Canyon, Sudan
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During the early Holocene African Humid Period (~13,000-6,000 years ago), shifting monsoon systems transformed much of the Sahara from desert into grassland, allowing people to occupy previously uninhabitable regions. In this context, Stone Age hunter-gatherers in the Middle Nile Valley developed some of Africa's earliest pottery and began experimenting with wild animal management and breeding. Over time, some groups adopted pastoralism while others maintained foraging economies, producing a mosaic of lifeways rather than a single linear transition.
Our team excavated sites at Jebel Shaqadud (semi-arid Sahel) and Jebel Sabaloka (Nile Valley) between 2011-2023, recovering extensive archaeological assemblages now curated in Prague. These materials span the onset of the African Humid Period through and the return to more arid conditions, thus capturing how people adjusted their mobility, subsistence, and social organization in response to major climatic thresholds.
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My zooarchaeological analyses focus on how human-animal relationships evolved as the climates shifted from arid to wet conditions and back again. By examining hunting versus herding, reconstructing habitats through taxonomic composition, and comparing riverine versus inland adaptations, I trace multiple pathways through which people responded to environmental uncertainty.
Planned isotopic analyses of faunal remains will reconstruct local rainfall and water availability patterns, creating integrated datasets that directly link environmental transformation to economic reorganization. Together, these lines of evidence provide a deep-time perspective on climate resilience in northeastern Africa’s semi-arid and Sahelian zones.
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Projected increases in aridity and temperature across northern Africa over the next 50 years pose serious risks for food and water security in already vulnerable regions. By documenting how past societies weathered comparable climate transitions, this research offers empirically grounded analogues for the future. More broadly, this work also provides a comparative framework for modelling complex relationships between climate, mobility, and economic decision-making in arid landscapes.