Title: Predicting Agricultural Futures: What Ancient Food Webs Reveal About Resilience and Vulnerability in Highland Ethiopia

Join us as our own Helina Woldekiros, Ph.D., (Associate Professor of Archaeology,  Department of Anthropology, WashU) gives a fascinating talk as part of our Spring 2026 Colloquium Series! 

What can ancient food webs teach us about the future of agriculture? Dr. Woldekiros presents research from Kaffa, Ethiopia—the birthplace of coffee and one of Africa's last Afromontane cloud forests—examining contemporary agricultural networks through comparative food web ecology. By quantitatively comparing Kaffa with archaeological cases spanning seven millennia, she demonstrates how network structure predicts sustainability, offering a new framework for understanding agricultural resilience under climate change.