DAMARA

Today, sheep and goats are economic pillars of African populations and pastoralism represents the primary way of life in the continent's warm arid and semi-arid regions. Such constrained climates demand animals highly adapted to their environments and customised practices from herders, distinct from those in more temperate regions. After their introduction to Africa from the Near East, domesticated caprines gradually spread from the northeastern part of the continent to its southernmost tip. It remains challenging to assess archaeologically the extent to which African environments impacted the speed and routes of the diffusion of pastoralism. In that sense, the constraints imposed by these new biotopes on the animals, but also on the behavioural responses of the first herders, still remain poorly documented and understood. Due to preservation issues, molecular archaeology has often overlooked African ecofacts because of the technical challenge they represent. Indeed, arid and semi-arid climates rapidly alter the bone organic phase after deposition, leading to an assumed poor preservation of biomolecules. Consequently, the archaeology of early herding on the continent still critically lacks fine-scale documentation. DAMARA will contribute to solve this challenge by integrating new data about herd management and reveal how pathogens influenced the migrations of both herds and humans across the continent. It will combine zooarchaeological, molecular and behavioural evidence to reassess the role played by domesticated caprine in the diverse constrained environments of Holocene Africa. Using an innovative approach spanning 4,000 years of herding, and integrating archaeological sites located on one of the putative routes of Caprinae dispersal across Africa, DAMARA will transform our comprehension of the incorporation of these domesticates into African societies, allowing us to reflect on the importance of ancestral, local and highly adaptive subsistence practices.