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This presentation adopts an archaeological framework to reconceptualise smallholder innovation in Elgeyo Marakwet County, Kenya, as an iterative historic process to be harnessed as a mechanism for future agricultural design. The rationale to do so stems from the notion that mainstream attempts for transforming food systems across the region remain focused on modernising paradigms that overlook historic and contemporary smallholder practice as a source of innovation for the shaping of resilient agricultural landscapes. A range of landscape surveys, participatory maps and oral histories are presented to reveal how agrarian lifeways across Elgeyo-Marakwet are characterised by creative experimentation, improvisation and innovation in the face of ever changing social and ecological conditions.

Dr Samuel Lunn-Rockliffe is an Early Career Research Fellow at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge. His current research focuses on the archaeology of the recent past and contemporary world in Africa, drawing upon archaeology’s predilection for exploring social life through everyday objects and landscapes in order to foreground histories, memories and things that are otherwise obscured by dominant development narratives.