Faculty biography - Chester Cain
Chester Cain, Faculty Director for the Fall 2009 ACM Tanzania program and the Spring 2010 ACM Botswana program, remembers his first impression of Tanzania - the sights of the palm trees, rusted corregated iron roofs, and blue sky - when he landed in Dar es-Salaam in 1993. Since then, his interest in the people of Africa and their past has brought him repeatedly to Tanzania and other parts of Africa. One of the few archaeologists in the world to have worked on projects that encompass nearly 4 million years of human existence.
Chet, as most people call him, began his research career overseeing excavations at towns with stone buildings in Tanzania and Ethiopia. He was part of the large British Institute in Eastern Africa program at the city of Axum in the mid-1990s. During graduate school, Chet assisted with the major conservation project to save the site of Laetoli, a series of footprints made by human ancestors 3.6 million years ago, as a consultant to the Getty Conservation Institute. One of the highlights of his career was to meet the world renowned palaeoanthropologist who first dug the site, Mary Leakey, when she came for a visit to the site a few months before her death. During the two field seasons he worked with the Tanzanians and the GCI, days off usually meant climbing into a land rover to go to Olduvai Gorge, Ngorongoro Crater, Lake Manyara, or another of the impressive wildlife or cultural sights of northern Tanzania.
From 2001-2004, Chet moved to the middle. Not satisfied with researching some of the earliest human remains and working on the later cities of Africa, he started to work on the Middle Stone Age. He was invited to bring his experience studying the animal bones from archaeological sites to South Africa to help Lyn Wadley and the ACACIA programme study the appearance of culturally modern behavior. Undergraduate and graduate students came from all over the world to assist the excavations in KwaZulu-Natal.
During this time, Chet also worked on how people were acquiring and using animals as they occupied and built international trade networks from the island of Pemba, off the coast of Tanzania. The economic power shifted from Pemba to Zanzibar about 400 years ago after the Portuguese disrupted the Indian Ocean trade. As a result, Chet has had to cross the Pemba Channel between the islands many times.
During 2005 and 2006, Chet was a consultant to the Maloti-Drakensberg Transfrontier Project, which is a biodiversity protection and eco-tourism development iniative for the mountains that straddle the border of the Kingdom of Lesotho and the Republic of South Africa. Chet, working in Lesotho, helped trained and worked with local Basotho technicians to collect information on archaeology, rock art, palaeontology, and oral history from the project area. The data will help the Lesotho MDTP office and government develop plans that incorporate heritage protection and cultural tourism in the Maloti mountains.
Currently, Chet lives in St. Louis, and has taught archaeology and anthropology as an adjunct instructor at many of the colleges and universities there, and has research appointments at Washington University in St. Louis and Rice University (Houston TX).