91探花视频

Building from a longstanding research programme of over ten years, the study interrogates the ecological inflexibility of a Red Cross funded irrigation project in Elgeyo-Marakwet’s semi-arid Kerio Valley, paying specific attention to how the scheme was imprinted atop of, and partially undermined, a c.250-year-old system of sustainable, resilient and locally developed irrigation farming. These pre-existing agricultural landscapes are comprised of short and long fallow field systems, complex patterns of soil fertility maintenance and the propagation of diverse landrace crops. Intensive farming is supported by over 300 kilometres of irrigation channels. These channels are inherently flexible, being opened, closed and diverted on daily, seasonal and yearly cycles to enable soil and vegetation regeneration and support the cultivation of diverse foodstuffs across a range of ecologies. This dynamic system has supported three-fold population increases and the weathering of major climatic episodes over the last two centuries.

Despite this long history of agricultural resilience, interventionist development policy has persistently portrayed Marakwet farming as inefficient and fragile. Such narratives have, in turn, been used to justify multiple development projects over the last 80 years, with the Red Cross irrigation project being the latest example of external intervention. Conceived as a technical solution to address regional food insecurity, the scheme aimed to scale up food production through the implementation of a fixed pipe system and the provision of agricultural inputs for cash cropping. This design stood in stark contrast to the flexibility of older agricultural systems, the repercussions of which were quickly apparent. An inability to avoid gullies and poor soils, inadequate water pressure and broken plastic fixtures all became immediate challenges for participant farmers. More problematically, the allocation of land for the project disrupted delicate pre-existing land tenure systems, fuelling historic tensions between Marakwet communities. Ultimately the Red Cross withdrew operational activities and, with broken equipment and increasing levels of insecurity, the project was abandoned after only two seasons.

By using archaeological, historical and ethnographic data to explore the roots of contemporary policy failure, this case study lays the foundations for new forms of applied and useable contemporary archaeology rooted in transdisciplinary research with local communities, practitioners and policy makers. The Red Cross irrigation project illustrates how certain forms of development planning rely on the notion that science, technology and engineering can be deployed in a straightforward, objective and ahistorical manner without recourse to local forms of knowledge and collaboration. In view of this, we suggest that effective applied archaeologies must start by critically examining contemporary contexts, working not from the past into the present, but rather from the present into the past to analyse the successes and failures of scientists and policy-makers and how these relate to the challenges and solutions of contemporary and future community life. In this sense, the strength of applied contemporary archaeologies to address major global challenges does not necessarily lie in its ability to contribute data to build analogy or offer environmental baselines for uncritical policy implementation. Rather, contemporary archaeologists can act as facilitators and critical interlocutors between different forms of temporal and material knowledge to design futures with, rather than for, local stakeholders. In a range of post-development and de-colonial literature, such transdisciplinary research and action is increasingly being referred to what Arturo Escobar has termed ‘pluriversal design’. The project team see this paper as a necessary first step in drawing on such approaches to develop more critical contemporary and applied archaeologies of current global challenges.