Shayla Monroe, PhD

Assistant Professor of Anthropology, 

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. 

Bio

Shayla Monroe is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University and the Director of the Zooarchaeology Laboratory in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.  She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), in 2021. She specializes in faunal analysis, the social zooarchaeology of Sudan and Egypt, the archaeology of African pastoralism. Since 2013, she has worked as an archaeologist at the 3rd Cataract of the Nile River in Sudan, first at the Egyptian colonial site at Tombos, and then at the Kerma hinterlands site, Abu Fatima, also in northern Sudan. Monroe began her career at Howard University, where she earned degrees in Anthropology and English (2012).  She also spent two seasons (2010 and 2011) working at L’Hermitage plantation (also known as the Best Farm Slave Village) with the National Park Service in Frederick, Maryland.  Dr. Monroe’s present research focuses on mapping social networks and relationships among pastoralists in the Middle Nile Valley and adjacent regions from the Late Neolithic to the end of the Bronze Age.