Date of Award

2015

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Baram, Uzi

Keywords

Oral Tradition, Turkana Peoples, Landscape Archaeology, Turkana, Kenya

Area of Concentration

Anthropology

Abstract

While archaeology stems from Western colonial practice, there is a need to promote African archaeologies that integrate African ways of seeing the world. Landscape archaeology and oral tradition, used as historical tools, have the potential to create knowledge and interpretation free of the Western system of thought. In Turkana, Kenya, the dry, unpredictable landscape is a repository of Turkana pasts. Using landscape archaeology as a theoretical lens, this thesis is a survey of Turkana historical pasts through the present. Looking at the Turkana landscape as a multilayered and everchanging palimpsest can help one better understand how people live in and take part in changing the landscape through time, which is told in oral tradition. The Turkana oral tradition of origin facilitates understandings of how people collectively identify as a mostly transhumant cultural group practicing various subsistence strategies, and how people negotiate living in the politicized, contemporary Kenyan landscape.

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