Landscape, people and parks

Project summary

The lower valley of the River Omo, in southwestern Ethiopia , is one of the culturally and biologically most diverse regions of East Africa . Over the past 200 years it has undergone large-scale physical changes, due to falling rainfall over the Ethiopian highlands, which have affected, and been affected by human movement, settlement and land use. Since the 1960s, two national parks have been established and there is a growing tourist industry – both developments reflecting Western assumptions about the equilibrium of ‘natural' ecosystems and about the need to protect ‘wildernesses' areas from human use and occupation. This is an ideal location for a study of the interaction between people and the environment and of the culturally specific ways in which landscape is described, imagined and ‘constructed'. The project brings together historical, anthropological and ecological methods with the aim of answering questions about the changing landscape of the Lower Omo that could not be approached successfully following a single-discipline route.

For more details of this three-year project, please go to the project summary document

Progress and Highlights

Year 1 (July 2007-June 2008)

A Memorandum of Agreement was concluded with the Institute of Ethiopian Studies , Addis Ababa University , for the affiliation of the project to the Institute. Dr Mohammed Umer of the Department of Geology, Addis Ababa University , and Ethiopia 's leading palynologist, agreed to become a Senior Collaborator with the project. A similar agreement was reached with Dr Henry Lamb of the Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences at the University of Aberystwyth, a specialist in lake sediment records of climatic and vegetation change who has worked for many years in East Africa and Ethiopia..

Between October 2007 and May 2008, seminar's, conference papers and lectures arising from the project were given at an IUCN Workshop on Community Conserved Areas (Kure Mts., Turkey), the Geography Department, King's College London, the School of Geography, Trinity College Dublin; the African Studies Centre, University of Oxford; the Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology, Memphis; St Cross College Oxford; the Centre for Global Collaboration, University of Osaka and the Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, University of Aberystwyth.

The Christensen Foundation of Palo Alto, California, has funded a two-year project, run by Dr Turton, to set up a website focusing on one of the main human populations of the study area, the Mursi, who will be a key focus of the project. The website is now ‘live' at http://www.mursi.org/

A project bibliography, amounting to around 1,000 items, has been assembled in order to facilitate a survey of the current state of knowledge of the environment and peoples of the Lower Omo .

The project's first field season took place between December 2007 and March 2008. Drs. Gil-Romera, Lamb and Mohammed Umer spent three weeks in January taking sediment cores from two oxbow lakes, Shoshi (5.22 N) and Dipa (5.10N), in Kara territory, on the east bank of the Omo. The material collected is being processed in the Quaternary Laboratory at the University of Aberystwyth , for pollen and micro-charcoal analysis. Dr. Turton spent six weeks, between December and February, working with Mursi informants on life histories, and oral accounts of landscape change recorded during earlier fieldtrips. Dr Bassi carried out library research in Addis Ababa and held a series of meetings and semi-structured field interviews with members of Dassanech, Kara and Nyangatom communities in the Lower Omo between January and March.

Between October 2007 and June 2008, Dr Bassi visited the archives and libraries of the Italian Geographical Society, the Aeronautica Militare, the ISIAO, the Aereototeca di Stato and the Accademia dei Lincei (all in Rome) and the Pasteur Institute in Paris, to consult documentary, photographic and cartographic resources relating to the Lower Omo in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries..

In order to understand the short term (decadal) distribution and history of different land covers and uses in the Lower Omo, Dr Gil-Romera has been working with colleagues in the Remote Sensing Laboratory of the Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences at Aberystwyth to classify a time series of satellite images covering the study area. The aim of the classification is to understand vegetation structure in relation to human induced factors such as grazing and fire pattern over the past thirty years.

Year 2 (July 2008-June 2009)

A second and final period of fieldwork will begin in November 2008, running through to March 2009. Dr Gil-Romera will be in the study area for approximately two months, carrying out further palaeoecological work and a vegetation survey and ‘ground truthing' for the remote sensing study. Professor Anderson, Dr Bassi and Dr Turton will continue the collection of oral historical data amongst the four main groups of the study area – Dassanech, Nyangatom, Kara and Mursi. The remote sensing study will be completed with the production of a series of vegetation maps and two dissemination workshops will be held later in the year, one in Addis Ababa and one in Oxford .