SEMINAIRE / SEMINAR

Fish population natural evolution and fishing practices in the East African Rift Valley since the end of the Pleistocene

 by Lucie Coudert

“Evolution: an international research seminar in Eastern Africa. Paleobiodiversity, paleobiology, prehistory, paleoenvironments” (CFEE-ARCCH joint seminar)

26ème séance  /  26th session

Date : Jeudi 10 octobre 2019, 15h30-17h00 / Date: Thursday October 10, 2019, 3:30-5:00pm

À / Venue: Authority for Research and Conservation of Cultural Heritage, Meeting Hall (room 308)

Several prehistoric archaeological sites in the Rift Valley have yielded a large amount of fish remains. The latter can document both the animal resources acquisition strategies and the importance of fish in the diet of human groups during the prehistory. However, in the East African Rift Valley, during the Pleistocene and the Holocene, the lakes level fluctuations resulted in successive connection then separation between watersheds currently isolated. Such changes in the hydrological conditions have modified significantly the composition of the fish communities. It is therefore impossible to refer to the modern biogeographical data to know their natural composition. An attempt to estimate the community composition at different periods was therefore initiated to interpret the archaeological spectra. The first results of this study will be presented in this communication, as well as a summary of data about the practices and importance of fishing in the northern Rift Valley since the end of the Pleistocene.

L’intervenant / The speaker

Lucie Coudert is a postdoctoral researcher in African archaeozoology. She obtained her doctoral thesis at the Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, in the laboratory TRACES (UMR5608). She studied fishing during the Holocene in the Rift Valley, the Nile Valley and the Western Sahel. She is now focusing her research on the Ethiopian Rift Valley.