Coastal Caprines: Using ZooMS to Trace the Spread of Domesticates in Eastern Africa

The transition to food production in human prehistory is widely recognised as one of the fundamental processes that shaped the modern world. In coastal eastern Africa, the timing and nature of this transition is still widely debated, with different models suggesting that plant and animal domesticates began arriving anywhere between 4000 to 1000 years ago through various combinations of intra-African diffusion and migrations. Key amongst these exchanges was the introduction of new domesticates such as cattle (Southwest Asian and Indian species), sheep and goat, which were (and still are) the mainstays of food production for both mobile pastoralists and sedentary agriculturists across sub-Saharan Africa. A major impediment to reconstructing the arrival and dispersal of these species, however, is a lack of accurate methods for identification of highly fragmented faunal material. My project aims to address these issues by employing a method known as Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS), to reconstruct ancient faunal species introductions to eastern Africa, with a focus on differentiating sheep and goat. This method uses collage peptide markers preserved in archaeological faunal remains to identify species origin or to clarify difficult to morphologically differentiate species such as sheep and goat (Prendergast et al. 2018). The focus of this study will be on differentiating sheep and goat at a number of previously excavated archaeological sites along the eastern African coast and offshore islands.