The region of Southern Ethiopia (Borana) and Northern Kenya (Marsabit) is characterised by erratic rainfall, limited surface water, aridity, and frequent droughts. An important adaptive response to these conditions, of uncertain antiquity, has been the hand-excavation of a sequence of deep wells at key locations often along seasonal riverbeds and valley bottoms where subterranean aquifers can be tapped. Sophisticated indigenous water management systems have developed to ensure equitable access to these critical water resources, and these are part of well-defined customary institutional leadership structures that govern the community giving rise to a distinctive form of biocultural heritage. These systems, and the wells themselves, are increasingly under threat, however, from climate change, demographic growth, and socio-economic development. To contribute to an assessment of the scale, distribution and intensity of these threats, this study aimed to evaluate the land-use land-cover (LULC) and precipitation changes in this semi-arid to arid landscape and their association with, and impact on, the preservation of traditional wells. Multitemporal Landsat 5, 7 and 8 satellite imagery covering the period 1990 to 2020, analysed at a temporal resolution of 10 years, was classified using supervised classification via the Random Forest machine learning method to extract the following classes: bare land, grassland, shrub land, open forest, closed forest, croplands, settlement and waterbodies. Change detection was then applied to identify and quantify changes through time and landscape degradation indices were generated using the Shannon Diversity Index fragmentation index within a 15 km buffer of each well cluster. The results indicated that land cover change was mostly driven by increasing anthropogenic changes with resultant reduction in natural land cover classes. Furthermore, increased fragmentation has occurred within most of the selected buffer distances of the well clusters. The main drivers of change that have directly or indirectly impacted land degradation and the preservation of indigenous water management systems were identified through an analysis of land cover changes in the last 30 years, supporting insights from previous focused group discussions with communities in Kenya and Ethiopia. Our approach showed that remote sensing methods can be used for the spatially explicit mapping of landscape structure around the wells, and ultimately towards assessment of the preservation status of the indigenous wells.

The use of pixel-based remote sensing techniques in archaeology is usually limited by spectral confusion between archaeological material and the surrounding environment because they rely on the spectral contrast between features. To deal with this problem, we investigated the possibility of using geographic object-based image analysis (GEOBIA) to predict archaeological and non-archaeological features. The chosen study area was previously occupied by farming communities and is characterised by natural soils (non-sites), vitrified dung, non-vitrified dung, and savannah woody vegetation. The study uses a three-stage GEOBIA that comprises (1) image object segmentation, (2) feature selection, and (3) object classification. The spectral mean of each band and the area extent of an object were selected as input variables for object classifications in support vector machines (SVM) and random forest (RF) classifiers. The results of this study have shown that GEOBIA approaches have the potential to map archaeological landscapes. The SVM and RF classifiers achieved high classification accuracies of 96.58% and 94.87%, respectively. Visual inspection of the classified images has demonstrated the importance of the aforementioned models in mapping archaeological and non-archaeological features because of their ability to manage the spectral confusion between non-sites and vitrified dung sites. In summary, the results have demonstrated that the GEOBIAs ability to incorporate spatial elements in the classification model ameliorates the chances of distinguishing materials with limited spectral differences.

This paper presents the aims, methods, and some initial results of the project ‘(Re)Constructing the Archaeology of Mobile Pastoralism (CAMP)’, a multi-disciplinary investigation into anthropogenic deposits from pastoral contexts in dryland regions. Ethnoarchaeology has played a pivotal role in transforming the study of pastoralism, particularly in environments where material traces are often ephemeral and underrepresented in the archaeological record. By linking contemporary practices with their material signatures, ethnoarchaeology has reshaped both the interpretation of pastoralist material remains and broader understandings of pastoral societies, revealing them as adaptive and innovative actors in highly variable environments. Building on recent theoretical and methodological advances—especially in geo-ethnoarchaeology—CAMP seeks to develop a robust interpretive framework for identifying chemical proxies that can be linked to specific human activities. Research in the first stage has focused on three ecologically and culturally distinct regions: Maitengwe (Tutume Dist., Botswana), Khor Rori (Dhofar, Oman), and Loreamatet (Turkana, Kenya), with supplementary test areas to evaluate the broader applicability of the developed protocol. Fieldwork has targeted three site categories: inhabited campsites, to document the relationship between activities and their anthropic markers; abandoned campsites, to assess post-depositional and diagenetic transformations; and key archaeological pastoral sites, to reinterpret ancient deposits using models derived from present-day contexts. Preliminary results presented in this paper highlight significant differences in the composition of chemical elements across activity areas within settlements, underscoring the potential of these proxies to distinguish activity-specific signatures. By integrating ethnoarchaeology, geoarchaeology, and geochemistry, the project advances methods for detecting and interpreting pastoral signatures in the archaeological record, while contributing to the repositioning of drylands as dynamic centers of resilience and innovation.