Archaeology and African food security
I am an anthropological archaeologist and assistant professor of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh Pennsylvania.
I am currently considering applications for doctoral students pursuing research related to eastern African prehistory including lithic technology, early food production, migration, environmental history and climate change. Please see the Department of Anthropology Website for more information and feel free to contact me by email with any questions.
My research is focused on eastern Africa, where I investigate the complex relationships between people and their environments over the last 12,000 years. I am particularly interested in investigating how these interactions shaped resilience and community-level food security in the African past. Understanding how past societies coped with environmental risk is crucial to informing our approach to threats of modern anthropogenic climate change and working toward climate-smart forms of food sovereignty for local communities.
I work to reconstruct past environments through environmental archaeology and I study the related human strategies through my specialization using lithic analysis. Currently, I am directing multiple field and laboratory projects working in collaboration with local communities, museums, and universities in Kenya and Zambia. Many of these projects investigate transformations of agricultural systems and the economic infrastructures underlying ancient African food production.
My current research projects focus on:
Collaborating with historians and plant geneticists to determine how climate change, migration history, and colonial-era land-use policies impacted extant genetic diversity of African crops.
Fisher-hunter-gatherer resilience through periods of extreme climate change at the site of Lothagam-Lokam in northern Kenya. (12000-6000 BP).
The role of technological strategies, mobility, and exchange networks in the long-term sustainability of the earliest herding societies in eastern Africa. (5000-1500 BP).
The spread of people, plants, animals, and iron-working in eastern Africa and how changing human-environmental interactions impacted community-level food security into the present (2500-100 BP) focused on research sites in southern Kenya, Zambia, and Tanzania.
The Lake Naivasha Basin, southern Kenya
Why Africa?
I am interested in pursuing archaeological questions on a global scale, however my research is focused on African prehistory. Africa is the cradle of humankind, and our early experiences in its diverse environments motivated us to develop the technologies and social systems that allowed us successfully spread across the planet. It is in Africa where human-environmental interactions have the greatest time-depth.
The last 12,000 years of Africa are particularly important. Trajectories toward food production (farming and herding), urbanism, and social complexity in Africa differ from those in other parts of the world, permitting unique perspectives on some of the most important shifts in the human career. One of the most interesting aspects of the African archaeology is the long-term persistence and co-existence of herder, farmer, and hunter-gatherer societies.
One of the most interesting aspects of African history is the long-term persistence and co-existence of herder, farmer, and hunter-gatherer societies. A rich ethnographic record gives us opportunities to ask questions about relationships among environment, technology, and culture that are rarely possible elsewhere. Unfortunately, Africa remains understudied. Archaeological research projects focused on the recent past number in the dozens for the entire African continent- fewer than there are for much shorter time periods in individual regions in Europe or the the Americas. The African past is an important part of our shared human past, and has important contributions to major archaeological debates.
Africa also faces the most immediate and extreme effects of anthropogenic climate change, most notably increasing aridity. Our popular culture and media often portray Africa as being composed of "natural" environments devoid of people, or as a place where the environment presents constant insurmountable challenges for African societies. New research in Africa is showing that this could not be further from the truth. The epidemics, collapses, famines, and environmental degradation that dominate popular discussion are more often than not a product of recent colonialism, geo-politics, and misguided development initiatives. Archaeological perspectives show that Africa's diverse societies had developed comprehensive arsenals of social and economic strategies for confronting, surviving, and even thriving, in the face of climatic challenges. Understanding what built the resilience of past African societies is critical to informing strategies for managing similar challenges in the present.
Recent Publications
Comparing Later Stone Age to Iron Age Quartz Lithic Technologies in Western Kenya- ST Goldstein - Lithic Technology, 2026.
Isotopic evidence for dietary variability among eastern Africa’s first pastoralists. Chritz, K.L., Sawchuk, E.A., Prendergast, M.E., Blumenthal, S.A., Cerling, T.E., Dunne, J., Goldstein, S.T., Grillo, K.M., Janzen, A., Kiura, P. and Lee-Thorp, J., 2026. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 123(22), p.e2532741123. 2026.
Cultural, economic, and settlement shifts over the last 9,000 years at Kakapel Rockshelter, Western Kenya. Goldstein, S.T., Mueller, N.G., Finestone, E., Sawchuk, E.A., Juengst, S., Otwani, A.O., Miller, J.M., Langley, M.C., Fernandes, R., Steinhof, A. and Iminjili, V… PloS one, 20(8), p.e0328805.
Affiliated Institutions
