CCPA Summer Series 2022: Koobi Fora Field School

Funding Source: Deborah Lafer-Scher International Internship

Thanks to the CCPA’s Deborah Lafer-Scher International Internship program, I was able to attend the Koobi Fora Field School, an archaeological and paleoanthropological training program run by George Washington University and the National Museums of Kenya. After nearly 30 hours of flights from my home in Chicago, with an unexpected layover in Cairo, I arrived in Nairobi at 4:00 a.m., then got right to work at 6:00 a.m. that same day. We spent one day in Nairobi, where we visited the National Museums of Kenya before loading up the Land Rovers and Unimog (an open air ex-New Zealand Army vehicle owned by the National Museums) to begin our journey north to the Mpala Research Center. We stayed in Mpala for one week to train on modern ecology, taphonomy (the science of how fossil sites form), human biology, and paleolithic archaeology. While here, we also chose our research projects for the summer. I was lucky and got to work with Jon Reeves, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, using experimental archaeology (where I make the stone tools) to create a reference to compare to the archaeological samples (where I dig the stone tools).

Moving north from Nanyuki after the first week, we spent two long and dusty days on the road, stopping in the small town of South Horr, before descending into the Rift Valley and approaching Lake Turkana. By now, temperatures rose to between 90 and 115 degrees Fahrenheit and would stay in that range for the next five weeks, until we returned south. We arrived in the Koobi Fora formation and spent the next few days finishing our bone ID training on the specimens held at the base camp and preparing to start fieldwork. After driving two hours north to our camp in the town of Illeret, Kenya, we started our field work the next day. I began excavating at a 1.5 million year-old site and spent the next several weeks on the side of an outcrop (exposed rock formation) digging down to a prehistoric floodplain layer. Excavation was hot and dusty,—there was no shade at the site—but it was worth every second. We discovered exceptionally high concentrations of stone tools, which we hope are linked to other archaeological sites nearby. Future work will test that hypothesis.

After about three weeks outside of Illeret, we moved to the Koobi Fora basecamp right on the shores of the beautiful Lake Turkana (downside: it was crocodile nesting season). There, I began performing my experimental archaeological work, where I used a random number generator to select which flakes to remove from the core. Then, using a 3D scanner, I made models of the archaeological and experimental materials. This let me take virtual “snapshots” of the core I was reducing, so we could study how the shape changed over time. We then compared the experimental material to the archaeological record with a method called 3D geometric morphometrics—a fancy way of saying we compared two 3D scans and quantified how they differed in shape. I then presented this work on the final day at basecamp to my peers and mentors and prepared for the early wakeup call to begin the journey back south.

I loved being in Kenya and meeting people from all over East Africa and the world. While at Koobi Fora, I got to know researchers and students from Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya, the U.S., Germany, Netherlands, Chile, South Africa, and Switzerland. I especially loved field work. Archaeology cannot function without new discovery. The discoveries we made this summer, both on my project and across all the teams, have implications for how we understand human evolution, cultural origins, human adaptation to climate change, human-environment interactions, and health issues related to water scarcity. 

Our work this summer created data from the past that can help us understand the present and future human condition, and my small role in this was made possible by the Deborah Lafer-Scher International Internship. Travel to Northern Kenya—totaling around seventy hours including both air and car travel—is expensive and time consuming, which means that outside funding is essential for nearly all students. In return, that student research is critical for all of us. It generates new understanding about how humans evolved and why we are what we are. I hope that future students will be able to secure the funding to travel to East Africa and learn first-hand about these often overlooked areas of the world. Paleoanthropological fieldwork is indirectly future oriented: by understanding the past, we can better understand the present.