This application seeks support for two expert meetings and other participatory events for MoHoA partners and affiliates from the Global South to coincide with and enable their attendance at the MoHoA conference titled 'Modern Heritage and the Anthropocene', organised by The Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL), The School of Architecture at Liverpool University, and the University of Cape Town. The two expert meetings will be held immediately before and after the conference to capitalise on and maximise the opportunities afforded by such an ambitious one-off event. Combined with associated UK site visits and meetings, the expert meetings will provide a unique and timely opportunity to bring together academics, practitioners, and other related professionals and stakeholders from different disciplines to strengthen global research networks engaged with decolonising, decentring, and reframing modern heritage and contribute to the completion of the Cape Town Document on Modern Heritage. This seminal document will be formally presentation to UNESCO after the conference at the second expert meeting on 29 October 2022. Research networking activities will take place during two one-day expert meetings addressing specific topics related to MoHoA's agenda including the finalisation of the Cape Town Document on Modern Heritage, as well as specific site visits / tours of partner institutions in the UK. This application will allow up to 12 international partners from the Global South to engage meaningfully with a wide range of UK participants, professionals, and organisations, including universities, museums, galleries, National Trust, and Historic England, Scotland and Wales. This process will be documented in an edited open-access book and, together with MoHoA's wider activities, compiled into a series of freely available teaching materials on MoHoA's website. MoHoA's conception coincided with the 20th anniversary of the Modern Heritage Programme, jointly initiated by UNESCO, ICOMOS, and DOCOMOMO in 2001, presenting a timely and important opportunity to reflect on the transformative cultural experiences and global consequences of the recent past that heralded the dawn of the Anthropocene and its impacts on society, culture, climate, and the planet. Since its inception, MoHoA has successfully attracted funding for discrete activities and developed a strong research network that engaged hundreds of participants across four thematic workshops with key partners including the Africa World Heritage Fund (AWHF), UNESCO, ICOMOS, ICCROM, IUCN, the Swahilipot East Africa Heritage Hub and the Getty Conservation Institute. It also hosted an international (online) conference at the University of Cape Town in Sept 2021 with over 50 papers presented. The initial phase of MoHoA was conceived within an African frame for two reasons. Firstly, the continent has been uniquely marginalised by current conceptualisations of 'modern' within heritage discourses. (Africa has just 89 cultural UNESCO World Heritage sites (less than Italy and Spain combined), compared with Europe's 439, and only one of these is exclusively categorised as 'modern heritage' - Asmara: A Modernist African City, the former Italian colonial city and capital of Eritrea). Secondly, Africa will experience the highest rates of urbanisation over the next 30 years. The heritage of our recent past therefore possesses the paradox of being of modernity and yet existentially threatened by its consequences. The diverse issues associated with this paradox, from ecological crisis to structural racism, and their lessons for researching, defining, protecting, and ascribing value to 'the modern', will be the focus of the MoHoA conference at UCL in Oct 2022 and the activities outlined in this application. If successful, this collaboration will make one of the most significant contributions to decentring heritage theory and practice in more than a generation.

Despite the fact that approximately 85% of total agricultural output across the African continent is produced by small-holder farmers, with the small-holder farming sub-sector accounting for 75% of Kenya's total agricultural output, there remains a persistent imagining amongst some academics, policy makers and NGOs that African farming practices are static, inefficient and inherently vulnerable in the face of environmental change and population growth. These ideas have in turn supported a longstanding modernising paradigm whereby African agriculture is argued to require a host of 'new' technical inputs such as mechanisation, chemical fertilisers and pesticides, and hybrid and GM crops. This process has deep colonial roots and, in the wake of pressing issues surrounding climate change and population growth, has re-emerged in recent calls for a new African Green Revolution. However, this 'modernising' paradigm has failed to deliver sustainable prosperity, suggesting that alternative frameworks are required. By analysing how small-holder farmers in Eastern Africa innovate in daily practice, this project will reconsider why wholesale attempts at modernisation have often failed and, in the process, offer alternative ways toward prosperous rural livelihoods. Working with multisectoral partners currently active in food systems research and delivery, we challenge the 'modernisation' imperative by historicising contemporary farming practices in Kenya and diachronically exploring ongoing processes of innovation and ingenuity that seem to have been characteristic of African farming for centuries, arguing instead that these may offer crucial insights into the future of farming practice in the region. The premise that African farming systems have historically been diverse and highly adaptive draws upon a wealth of archaeological and historical material that demonstrates how they have developed in dynamic ways over several thousand years, continuously diversifying as they became integrated into expansive inter-continental exchange networks with SW Asia, India and China. Such processes continued into the 19th century when, with the formalisation of colonisation, new waves of domesticates and concepts surrounding soil and forest conservation were introduced by 'professional' colonial agricultural officers. Whilst many of these colonial interventions understood African agricultural systems as resistant to change (Anderson 2018; Beinhart 2000), we argue here for a more nuanced narrative wherein small-holders selectively adopted and propagated new ideas, practices, crops and materials (Moore 2018). In this view farmers experiment, generate knowledge, and selectively adopt the ideas of others on a daily basis. We argue that this historic process of creative innovation, selective valuation and intelligent (re-)combination is what constitutes what are often referred to (and often brought into opposition) as both 'tradition' and 'modernity' and that this historical reconceptualization offers an important new starting point for revaluing, supporting and extending farmers capabilities. Working with diverse partners we will co-design original empirical research with small-holder 'digital farmers' in Elgeyo-Marakwet Kenya. We have specifically chosen to work with partners from both the UK and Kenya and from academic, NGO, international and policy sectors so as to share diverse institutional practices and agenda and to co-design and deliver research that will stimulate institutional responses and specific policy recommendations. By working with, challenging, and supporting partners active in food systems research and delivery we aim to have multiple tangible impacts on policy making and farming livelihoods more broadly, thus demonstrating the important value of arts and humanities led multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary research.

Dietary change is a major driver of evolution amongst mammals, including early hominins (members of the human lineage). Recent developments in stable isotope analysis have revolutionized our understanding of early hominin biology and behaviour by allowing quantification of aspects of the diets of individual fossil hominins. Carbon isotope analyses of fossil hominin teeth have revealed a major dietary transition after 4 million years ago (Ma), from a concentration on C3 plants (leaves, fruit and nuts from trees, shrubs, and herbs) to diets extended to include tropical C4 plants (grasses and sedges) and/or animals. The biological significance of this innovation, and its relationship to the expansion of seasonal grass-dominated environments, remains unclear. The degree to which individuals relying on C4-based resources shifted their diet seasonally to include more C3 foods when available, or specialized in C4-based foods year-round, has profound implications for the selective pressures associated with resource availability and competitive interactions with other mammals. We know that the proportions of C4 resources varied strongly between individuals after ca. 3.9 Ma, suggesting unusual individual flexibility. Indirect evidence from living human and non-human primates suggests that hominin diets may also have varied seasonally, yet there is no direct evidence on the scale and pattern of such variability. The aim of this study is to evaluate the evolution of dietary variability in fossil hominins in eastern Africa from 4 to 1 Ma. Previous isotopic analyses of hominin fossils demonstrate substantial dietary variability between hominin individuals among some species. However, they relied on generating a single bulk isotope value per tooth, and therefore could not address variability within the lifetimes of individuals. Mammal teeth grow incrementally, and intra-tooth stable isotope profiles represent life-history archives of individual humans or animals during the period of tooth formation. Thus it is possible to measure seasonal-scale diet changes in fossil hominins and other primates by generating multiple isotope values per tooth using laser ablation microsampling. This approach has been successfully applied to a wide range of mammalian herbivores, as well as humans, and fossil hominins from South Africa. The latter study, conducted over 10 years ago, is significant because it demonstrates the validity of this approach in hominins, but it was not possible to evaluate long-term changes in dietary variability due to the restricted time span of fossils preserved in southern Africa. This approach has not yet been extended to eastern African fossil hominins, due to restrictions on isotopic sampling of fossil specimens. With the collaboration and full support of the National Museums of Kenya, it is now possible to evaluate long-term changes in dietary variability in eastern Africa using fossil hominins spanning the last 4 Ma. For comparison, we will also include extinct baboons, which show a dietary transition towards increasing reliance on C4 foods that partly mirrors hominins, to understand the relationship between C4-feeding and intra-annual dietary variability in a parallel lineage of terrestrial, large-bodied primates. To provide a modern baseline to ground other ecological inferences in the fossil record, we will conduct an isotopic study on modern savanna-dwelling baboons, which are often used as ecological models for early hominins. We use feces to provide an isotopic record of diet with high time resolution, easily capable of recording seasonal-scale changes, to better understand how carbon isotopes track known seasonal variation in the consumption of grasses and sedges, and what influences these shifts. Isotopic variation in feces will be compared to enamel from teeth collected from the same population.