From Enchantment to Entrapment: Following the Threads of Foreign Artifacts in San José de Moro

In recent years, Darwin's likening of the natural world to an entangled bank that can nonetheless be deciphered through an understanding of evolutionary processes and the history of ecological relationships that connect different parts to one another has taken on fresh significance. The young Charles Darwin first encountered the Tierra del Fuego landscape in December 1832; he was clearly struck by its novelty, remarking that even a single glance had shown it to be "widely different from any thing he had ever beheld. The ability to determine whether anthropogenic activities have been primary drivers of recent landscape, ecological, and climatic change, and to be able to discriminate between these and certain background natural processes at global, regional, and local scales are undoubtedly critical in supporting arguments for changes in human behavior to secure an environmentally sustainable future for the planet. This chapter explores referencing domestication of East African pastoralist landscapes and particularly the role of animal dung in these processes.