Lunch Club provides affiliates of the Stanford Archaeology Center with a community-oriented forum for engagement with current issues in archaeology. On November 12, 2025,  we will host Dr. Shayla Monroe from Harvard University.

Abstract:

Cows and horses are expensive investments for stockkeepers, especially in the harsher regions in and around the Sahara.  Throughout the Sahelian and Saharan past, the rewards for large stock investments were apparently worth the challenges posed by climate change, conflict, and disease vectors.  In several cases mentioned here (stretching from the Nile Valley and Eastern Sahara, through the Lake Chad region, to the western Sudanian Belt) some horse and cattle populations were subject to drastic changes in size and shape, become smaller over time. In which cases was “shrinking” a physiological response to ongoing stress, the result of intentional human selection, adaptation to ecological conditions, or perhaps a combination of detectable and undetectable factors?   This talk applies zooarchaeological methods to address historical and archaeological accounts of shrinking livestock, complex political ecologies, and the rewards and challenges of keeping large domesticates alive at the desert’s edge.