Quantitative Analysis of Drought Management Strategies across Ethnographically-Researched African Societies: A Pilot Study

Abstract

In this paper, we present a pilot study aimed at investigating the impact of subsistence strategies and environmental pressure on the distribution of ethnographically documented strategies to cope with drought and its effects across 35 current societies in Africa. We use freely accessible ethnographic databases to retrieve data on how a number of African societies deal with the circumstances of drought, and ascertain the impact of geography on their distribution in order to measure possible relationships between them, a set of subsistence choices, and proxies of environmental constraints. We use Canonical Correspondence Analysis to explore the emerging patterns and find that subsistence strategy strongly impacts the choice of drought management strategies, especially if considered with a proxy of local environmental condition. Spatial proximity and aridity per se have only marginal impact, highlighting other relevant processes of cultural transmission that at least partly transcend (a) the intensity of human interaction over geographic gradients and (b) local adaptation primarily dependent on water availability. This study supports the wide applicability of quantitative and replicable methods to cross-cultural evidence on a variety of adaptive strategies and uses ethnographic data to propose new hypotheses that can inform future archaeological research by showing recurrent and non-case-specific choices highlighting resilient practices and adaptive behaviour in Africa.

Small-scale farming in drylands: New models for resilient practices of millet and sorghum cultivation

“…The objective was to provide a consistent, coherent body of information, which allowed for the creation of a robust dataset for cross-cultural comparison on agricultural activities in drylands. The eHRAF database allows to perform comparative studies [ 23 ] by providing easy access to a wide range of ethnographic sources and it is being increasingly used to carry out ethnoarchaeologically driven pre-search [ 44 , 45 ]. The inclusion criteria for extracting the information from eHRAF for this study were:…”