Microbotanical Evidence for Pastoral and Agricultural Landscape Modification in Nyanza, Kenya

Generally poor preservation of macrobotanical materials in East African archaeological contexts has forced archaeologists to rely heavily on other secondary material proxies in interpretations of early agriculture and plant use in this region. Use of microbotanical evidence, including pollen, phytoliths, and fungal remains, in the investigation of changes in food production strategies is a methodology that is increasingly gaining momentum.  Data on pollen and fungal spores extracted from a late-Holocene sediment core from Yala Swamp, Nyanza, Kenya, is presented to illustrate the potential of microbotanicals to yield temporally and ecologically nuanced information on local food production histories by contextualizing archaeological and paleobotanical remains more broadly within local frameworks of environmental change and human landscape modification.  Changes in the representation of pollen and fungal taxons at this locality suggest that both human activity and long term environmental fluctuations have conditioned the ecology of Yala Swamp through time.