Meet the Scientist

Name: Chapurukha Kusimba
Position/Title: Associate Curator of Anthropology
Department: Anthropology

1. What do you study related to biodiversity (what are your research questions, what organisms do you work on)?

I study the role of technology, economy, and interaction in shaping diverse subsistence and ethnic identities of East Africans during the past 2,000 years. Since 1998, I have focused our survey and excavation in the Taita Hills, about 100 kilometers from the Coast. To date, we have recovered more than 200 sites spanning the Early Stone Age into the historic era.

By far the most important pattern we have discovered is a web of social interactions—interaction among peoples of diverse origins practicing and inventing different ways of life. The Taita region was a mosaic of economic and religious practices, inventions and vocations, trading relationships, political alliances, and social and individual identities.

Regional systems like these are only beginning to be understood and appreciated in many areas of the world. Working in Taita has taught me the importance of the regional context in the development of urbanism in areas like the East African Coast. Understanding the development of social complexity in Africa requires careful attention to a regional web of interactions amongst people, wildlife, and natural and cultural landscapes.

2. How do you study biodiversity (for example, what technological tools and methodologies do you use in your research)?

I primarily use archaeological, ethnoarchaeological, and ethnohistorical approaches. I undertake excavations, interview people, and analyze historic texts, ethnohistorical, and archaeological data to test hypotheses. My research focuses on the role of technology, economy, and interregional interaction in the evolution of complex chiefdoms, states, and urban polities.

Specifically, I hypothesize that iron technology, together with all of its concomitant social, political and economic effects, was a major factor in the development of the urbanization and cultural diversity in precolonial East Africa. I have conducted regional archaeological and ethnohistorical surveys to define settlement patterns for the past 2,000 years.

I furthermore augment these settlement data with problem-oriented excavations in key sites that have enabled me to define and refine the sequence of cultural changes in the region. In recent years, I have begun to work with biogeographers and biologists to understand the impact of human demand and use of animal products, especially cat skins and elephant ivory, on people and the environment in East Africa.

3. Where do you study biodiversity?

Tsavo National Park, Kenya

4. How might your research have implications for biological conservation?

The analysis of elephant ivory exports from East Africa beginning from the sixteenth century has yielded some unexpected and, in some instances, startling results: the effects on the number and distribution of elephants, and the choices of places for human settlement, were overwhelming.

The elephant has shaped much of the natural African landscape, rendering it more fit for habitation by human beings. Indeed, the first significant interaction of elephant and human lineages may have been during the Pliocene Era, when Loxodonts and other proboscideans created the first woodland environment where australopithecines are thought to have evolved. Since then, elephants have played a pivotal role in human affairs and an important role in shaping the ecosystem of African environments.

As they forage, elephants create and maintain broad paths through impenetrable bamboo and elephant grass belts, and in forested areas, they keep extensive glades in permanent state of early succession, not only breaking down trees but also tearing up acres of saplings for their roots. They excavate and weed out water holes, and "garden" interconnected glades and clearings into tangled vegetation.

Thus elephants open up habitats for ground dwelling mammals. Such habitats are more productive, by reason of access to both sun and water, and more ecologically diverse than either deep forest or open grasslands. A major advantage of elephant-maintained environments from a human standpoint is that they are not hospitable to the tsetse fly, the vector of sleeping sickness for humans, or trypanosomiasis for cattle, which requires deep shade for survival. Elephants have opened up much of tropical Africa, particularly lowland areas, for pastoralists and agro-pastoralists.

The introduction of high-quality iron and steel (and after the sixteenth century—guns) made possible the creation of effective elephant-killing weapons. Weapons of stone, bone and wood were undoubtedly capable of killing elephants. But no one believes that even the bravest and most skillful individuals would often have chosen to attack an elephant when armed with a spear or knife that might injure an eye or trunk but otherwise would barely penetrate the animal’s skin.

A heavy iron spear or an arrow with an iron point would offer a far greater likelihood that an elephant could be slowed or incapacitated in the initial attack, and I believe that this was what first made the routine hunting of elephants possible. The gun increased the range at which hunters could kill elephants. It also meant that many more elephants would be killed by relatively few specialized hunters.

Over-hunting of the elephant—a keystone species in the African savanna—had adverse effects on people and wildlife. Historical sources make it clear that substantial quantities of ivory were being shipped to West Asia and the Mediterranean and probably to South Asia as well by the twelfth century. This early demand for substantial quantities of ivory was the cause of an initial decline in elephant populations in the more accessible parts of the East African interior. Conducted largely by peripatetic hunters armed with high-quality iron weapons, this early phase of the ivory trade must have caused significant rearrangements of the elephant population.

It was evidently not as devastating as the second phase of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, marked by the introduction of effective guns and gunpowder. The first-phase hunters, after all, left a good many elephants for the second-phase hunters to kill. But any level of sustained, selective predation is enough to alter the distribution of animal populations, perhaps especially when the animals are as intelligent and as capable of intra-species communication as elephants. Elephants became much less common in the areas immediately adjacent to the coast and near the main trade routes to the interior.

The thinning out of local elephant populations would, in turn, have led to important changes in vegetation. Dense forest cover would have developed in areas with sufficient rainfall and along rivers, and elephant grass and thorn bush in drier savannas. Tsetse flies would have increased in numbers, and with them trypanosomiasis. This, plus the decrease in available forage, would have had a strongly negative effect on the survival, not only of humans, but also on the domestic ruminants on which the majority of recent East African societies depend.

Guns facilitated the hunting of people for enslavement. They also allowed humans to kill too many elephants, who are major sustainers of tsetse-free grasslands. Numerous other factors, naturally, would also enter into the schistosomiasis-human relationship: local and regional shifts in rainfall quantities and distribution; degree of non-human and human predation on other grazing animals; intensity of swidden cultivation; the deliberate burning of forest and grasslands; non-industrial uses of wood by humans; the availability of tools capable of cutting sod and tilling established grassland; the presence of other effective elephant-killing methods (for instance, through development of effective poisons), and so forth. However, where guns were used intensively to hunt elephants, they may have played an important and even central role in promoting the spread of schistosomiasis. This may have been far more important, in both environmental and human terms.

5. How did you become interested in science? What made you want to be a scientist, and how did you get to The Field Museum?

At a late age of seven years, I became interested in cultural and natural history of East Africa upon learning about the famous discoveries of Louis and Mary Leakey in Olduvai Gorge. I was intrigued by their claims that East Africa was the cradle of humankind and fascinated by the idea that all humans were first Africans before they became other cultures and nationalities. The idea that there was so much to discover in my own backyard that could change the way we look at our heritage as humankind greatly fascinated me and made me more interested in becoming a scientist.

As I was completing my doctoral dissertation in Anthropology at Bryn Mawr College, I learned about the position through my wife, who was then a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champain. I promptly applied for and was eventually offered the position in the Summer of 1994.

I began my anthropological career as a Research Scientist at the National Museums of Kenya from 1986-93. I joined the Field Museum of Natural History in 1993 as a tenure-track Assistant Curator of African Archaeology and Ethnography and was promoted to Associate Curator with tenure in 1999.

6. Describe important collaborations for your scientific endeavors (describe your work with other researchers, organizations, or scientific groups, local or indigenous peoples, etc.)

Since 1998, I have been collaborating with Sibel Barut Kusimba of Northern Illinois University, Bramwel Musombi Kiberenge, and Joseph Mworia of the National Museums of Kenya, to investigate the relationship between the Swahili urban settlements and the hinterland. We have concentrated our research effort in the Tsavo National Park. We are conducting the first in-depth analysis of the regional context of Iron Age Kenya Coast cities through site excavation in the Tsavo region, 150 km east of the Kenya Coast.

Tsavo was an important source of Indian Ocean and Kenya Coast trade goods, such as ivory, rhinoceros horns, iron ore or bloom, cat skins, and rock crystal. The region was home to a number of chiefdoms and tribal peoples who traded with each other well into the nineteenth century. We are examining how socioeconomic and cultural contacts with Coast cities transformed Tsavo peoples.

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