Agriculture in Africa faces multiple challenges. Climate extremes, ecosystem degradation and population growth continually prompt calls for the urgent transformation of food systems. Mainstream attempts remain focused on modernising paradigms in ways that overlook historic and contemporary smallholder practice as primary sources of innovation. This project challenges this narrative, adopting an archaeological framework to reconceptualise smallholder innovation as an iterative historic process harnessable as a mechanism for future agricultural design. Landscape surveys, object analysis and oral histories will explore shifting agrarian lifeways in Elgeyo-Marakwet, Kenya, to understand how farmers creatively innovate in the face of changing social and ecological conditions.