How Insects Might Have Mediated Human Mobilities and the Intensification of Food Production in the Zambezian Bioregion of South Central Africa in the First and Second Millennium CE

Abstract

The Zambezian bioregion of South Central Africa is an important area for addressing major questions for human-environmental interactions linked to the transition to agriculture. The dry savannah and open miombo woodlands were a frontier for farming societies in humid equatorial Africa, with the spread of agriculture in the region delayed by almost a thousand years. Despite their ubiquity, the role of insects as actors that both enabled and constrained processes of migration and land use change have received little attention as a factor mediating cultural practices and behaviours. Insect behavioural ecology is intimately tied to the material and symbolic cultures of people across South Central Africa today. Drawing upon literature and ethnographic evidence, multispecies interactions between humans, termites, mosquitos, and tsetse fly are explored to consider how they shaped the patterning of human settlement and migration in the context of intensifying food production in the first and second millennium CE.