 So I might just begin with a short ethnographic story. So while I was conducting ethnographic field work in Assam, northeast India, I attended a puja that took place on top of a hill. And this hill was used as a shifting cultivation site for growing rice, for a small community, and that lived in the forest close to Guwahati. And for those of you who don't know, Guwahati is the major city of northeast India. So after completing my observations, I decided to descend the hill with my friends, but from the opposite side from which we came, because it provided a more direct route down to my bikes that waited by a stream below. But unfortunately the descent was incredibly steep, there were no clear paths, and as you can see the rice drop was incredibly healthy and tall, and pretty much we couldn't see anything, so consequently we got lost, veered off course. And in order to correct our approach, we had to kind of cut our way back across the hill. But there was a problem because there was a rocky gully, and from our vantage we were unable to ascertain where it was saved across, and indeed how to get to that point to cross. But, luckily for us, we stumbled upon the recent track of an elephant herd that had ascended the hill and crossed its way across the shifting cultivation fields, and unfortunately for the farmer, they had crushed a lot of these rice straws, but fortunately for us, their heavy bodies had opened up a fresh path that seemed to be going in the direction that we wanted to go. So considering we didn't know what we were doing, we trusted in the elephant's better judgment, and the clear passage that the path afforded, and we followed the track which negotiated steep hill, found the appropriate crossing on the rocky gully, and also pointed us in the right direction back down to the stream, which I assume the elephants also went to. So while this track is only a temporary trace, when I used to walk occasionally through the forested hills next to my field site in Guwahati, my meanderings would sometimes become entangled with the more permanent paths of elephant herds that used to do through the area. When the herds revisit the same route by the time, the heavy feats, their heavy feet can give away to a flat, wide and hardened track that cuts a clear path through vegetation. In Assamese, a path that's frequently trafficked by elephants is called dundi. However, dundi are used nor given shape by elephants alone, so different animals, and especially the humans that live nearby to the forest and depend on its resources, will often participate in these trails. Honestly, I just found this on my hard drive, but I'm pretty sure it's an old path, I have to check my GPS and stuff. So, while I've begun in the ethnographic present and at a field site that I'm very familiar with, instead, my paper is going to take a turn towards the past, towards a place that I'm relatively unfamiliar with, and I want you to present some just a number of historical tidbits that I've picked up during my research, where I became quite interested in the idea where elephant trails were mentioned within historical literature. And my paper will argue that elephant trails, in part, would enable humans to occupy the difficult upland terrain of the North East India and beyond. So, to begin, I'll briefly consider what a forest path is, and then I'll illustrate how communities, British salt soldiers, and elephants, of course, were entangled along shared trails in the Mizo Hills in the 19th century. I'll then briefly analyse the biography of Alisu, who migrated from Upper Burma to India in the 60s. And then also, I will just talk about how interspecies trails are part of a mutual ecology, a co-constructive niche in which humans and elephants live, and I'll also consider, towards the end as well, maybe the possibility of a more-than-human history of upland Asia. Okay, so, what's a path? So, for ecological psychologist James Gibson, a path is an affordance. An affordance is a quality of the world that emerges from the interaction between an organism and the environment, whereby that quality enables the organism to perform a particular action. So, when an organism engages a path, for instance, which in a forest might be a clearing through vegetation, it perceives an aspect of the environment that enables movement. Humans and elephants are both dramatic ecological engineers. Their activities directly or indirectly modify the niche within which they live. But also, their activities and modifications also alter the affordances available to them. So, paths are environmental modifications that enable movement, but also simultaneously constrain them, right? So, paths also guide and shape the course of an organism's behaviour. So, the customer-folding trails allows the traces of past travellers to scaffold and guide the trajectories of future ones. So, it's just like when we walk on a path in some ways of work that we're required to do to orient ourselves in relationship to a destination, we don't have to worry about that anymore because the path doesn't work for us. So, we can just walk through the forest looking at our mobile phones, for example. Further, to engage an elephant path is not simply to be guided by it, but also to participate in its making. Trails are aspects of a shared ecological niche that are constructed by interactions among multiple species at a long period of time and can serve as affordances for a wide variety of animals. Human and free-riding elephant movement do not simply overlap but intertwine. Their behaviour is coordinated by the constraints of the forest pathways that they mutually give shape to. So, if anthropocentric bias has ignored how captive elephants were vital to the formation of South Asian society, whether it's a beast of burden, beast of war, transport animals, timber, timber-logger elephants, then we might be able to say that the same oversight exists for elephant paths or elephant ecosystem engineering. Of course, it's not, these things are never entirely unacknowledged, right? So, there are references to the paths within colonial literature, for example. So, here I've produced that tenet, Douglas Hamilton. He admired how the paths that elephants make over the range of hills they frequent are quite wonderful examples of engineering, and one cannot help but being struck with the skills which they have traced. The gradients are truly wonderful, avoiding every steep and difficult accent ascent by regular zigzags. And then in South India, we have Mr Ball, a botanist who praised the way that elephants assisted him to perform his research. So, on most of their hills, the elephants have made paths with a gentle ascent. Where these existed, I was enabled to do my work, which made me frequently bless them, and regard them no matter what they might be to the rios, as at least my benefactors. What a nice way of thinking elephants being our benefactors. In the northeast, British colonial surveyors, entrepreneurs, and military encountered a difficult terrain composed of densely forested hills. The Pakoy, a mountainous range on the Indo-Myan Mara border, was characterized by the British as dominated, or dramatically characterized by the British as dominated by slavers and raiders, and covered with the almost impervious jungle, traversed only by paths used principally by wild elephants and as the war traps of tribes. Conflict between the British army and upland communities around the Mizzow Hills, or the Wichita Hills, they were the British called at the time, were pretty well documented. The colonizers were involved in a protracted war that lasted quite some of 50, 40 to 50 years, with particular communities who disrupted British tea gardens and other outposts that encroached on indigenous territories. In response, colonial forces decided to advance into the hills to exert control and force submission. In the accounts of the Mizzow Hills incursion, particularly in 1871 and 1872, because they... Okay, so just to give a background, the British did try to go and do an incursion during the late 50s, but unfortunately they found the environment too challenging. But there was such a problem during the 70s, the colonial government decided they had to go and teach the offending communities of this, I guess. So in these accounts, there's a lot of mentions of elephant paths being used in order to get inside the interior. So when the British came across Mizzow Hill communities during the mid 19th century, they found a community that were intimately engaged with free-growing elephants for whom they lived on the side. So Mizzow settlements were actually organized in relation to elephant movement. So fields were planted, like shifting cultivation fields were planted to avoid pre-established roots. And some villages were also settled on top of hills at the end of very old elephant trails. And of course the Mizzow at the time were also very proficient, I guess, proficient elephant hunters. And elephant body parts performed a significant part of economic trade with the neighbouring plains. So British forces were now marching into the Mizzow Hills found it's vastly inhabited with few established trails, and the only way that they could progress was by following the river banks or the paths of elephants. The Mizzows as local inhabitants and elephant hunters unsurprisingly had a very intimate knowledge of these network of elephant paths and used to exploit them themselves. And in turn the British exploited the knowledge of local Mizzow neutral communities in order to further themselves in the hills. And in some cases the elephant paths were so in such good quality that they looked in parts as neatly defined as if they had been done by hand. However, not sculpted by elephant foot alone, the British found paths that led to Mizzow villages that were engineered by wild elephants and improved and used by the Mizzow. In turn apparently old Mizzow trails were also reciprocally maintained for other mega herbivores that lived in the area, so elephants, but of course there were rhinos in the area at that time as well. In some cases as well the army themselves further widened the tracks to facilitate the march of soldiers and transport of items further into the interior too. So more broadly elephant paths afforded the flow of people through the dense jungle and was along these co-produced inter-species trails that British were able to advance into their hills, survey the area, subjugate the population and then colonize the periphery of British India. So this exportative relationship of another animals ecosystem is not exceptional. Yesterday we heard from Andrews actually excellent talk about the relationship between elephants, cattle, herders and Uganda. The example I wanted to offer was American settlers in Ohio Valley in North America. So when the American settlers came in they followed an extensive system of buffalo trails and Jaipur argues that American settlement was currently rooted in the changing ecological complex of the American Indian and the Bison. So likewise when the British advanced into Mizzow Hills they became intertwined in a co-constructed ecological niche, a biotic and abiotic environment shaped by Mizzow and elephant communities for a few hundred years. Participating shared pathways, the British, the elephants from the Mizzow became coordinated as partners in the formation of place and history. The trails were an environmental interface that connected indirectly and directly connected each actor at social and behavioral levels. So zooming out a little bit now thinking on an evolutionary scale, archaeologist Gary Haynes argued that mega herbivores during the Pleistocene era not only engineered ecosystems but also contributed information and enhancements to human foraging efficiency thereby helping to make some rapid explorations, dispersals and colonisation so successful. So in other words, human migration and evolutionary history was entangled with the lives and niches of modern elephants, proto-city and ancestors. Marianne Lloyd, a mid-20th century missionary in Mizzow offered a similar observation for the Pakoi Range following elephants' discoverers saying it was they who in the west especially first opened up a number of important paths over mountains and through deep valleys. Following in the footsteps of elephants in Marianne Lloyd's opinion, enabled human populations to colonise the hilly regions and move over high passes along the Indo-Ianmar border. Some of these people would have had significant impacts on the social and biological ecology of northeast India. The Christian missionary Eugene Morse's account of the Lissu community fleeing upland bourbon in the 60s from the military junta illustrates how the persistent traces of elephant movement assisted in migration. In Morse's book, Exodus to a Hidden Valley, elephant paths were environmental features identified as determining the success of Lissu migration. The Lissu traversed a mountainous area west towards the border of India up close to the Salkhan Pass. If any of you guys know the Salkhan Pass was also mentioned in PDH Trace in this elephant gold where he reported that Errol Gray saw feet carved into the sandstone on a very high pass about 8,000 feet on the Indo-Ianmar border. PDH Trace he speculated that it perhaps supported generations of elephants passing in between India and Burma. Morse noted that the terrain that they were moving through towards India in Upper Burma was long uninhabited that there were no dedicated human roads and to cover the remote and hostile environment they followed as all people do the narrow animal trails. So when the Lissu were moving of course they weren't always following elephant paths all the time but they were cutting their own way with machetes but elephant paths were significantly mentioned. Travellers would often assemble and orient themselves at the junction of elephant paths and when they went to ascend steep hills they would follow the zigzagging tracks of herds. When the Lissu were discussing which routes were possible and they were skeptical of which high passes that might be achievable they also trusted in the existence of elephant paths to follow claiming the tracks would make their ascent easy and show where to cross between the higher ridges. And while the Lissu occasionally and opportunistically killed elephants during the migration and settlement they also interestingly expressed a customary hesitancy to kill them as well and they said it's because elephants were such good trail makers. Now, I've been exploring how trails are a kind of structural feature of a shared environment but I want to think a bit beyond that now too and I want to draw on the anthropologist Chris Tilly who notes that a path is a paradigmatic cultural act since it follows the footsteps inscribed by others whose steps have worn a conduit for movement which becomes the correct or best way to go. It's quite an interesting way of thinking about paths because in this respect trails are historical traces of elephants' way of life, right? So they are traces of relationships of elephant communities moving between foraging sides across time. They have patterns of behaviour and social patterns as well that were nurtured within a lifetime and across generations and will also continue to guide the future generations too. When we think about the Lisu it becomes more interesting because the best way to go for the Lisu had actually already been inscribed into the landscapes by elephant themselves. By following the routes over high passes that elephants would take the Lisu participated in their intergenerational habits and knowledge of these trail makers. The lines between human and non-human became blurred as the Lisu's own trajectory became intertwined with and guided by the elephant benefactors who came before them. So by following these paths we could say that the Lisu became part of a more than human history. So I'm going to start winding down and whilst it's completely outside the story of my expertise and it's favour, this interspecies relationship has potentially broader implications for thinking about a more than human history of upland Asia. In particular I'm thinking about the interconnecting hill and hilly range that spreads from northeast India and the Park Hoi through Burma, southern China, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam which most recently, James C. Scott, referred to as Zomia. So we know that for thousands of years elephants flowed through Asia prior to aggressive state-driven agricultural expansion and up until the 20th century, herds range extensively through Zomia and interestingly enough Zomia is also one of the last remaining bastions for surviving elephant populations. Jean-Michel estimates that more humans began colonising the region some four to five thousand years ago. Zomia is a geography shaped by the constant migration of diverse relatively isolated ethnic communities living amongst difficult terrain and moving between lowland states. Upland communities such as the Lisu and the Mizo have been to differing degrees in vital exchange with and contributing to the formation of powerful lowland states sharing a deep history of symbolic, economic and human traffic. So if Zomia can be characterised by the challenges of its terrain and the shifting population, then I think the history of this space could have been facilitated at least in parts by the landscape modification of free-roaming elephants. As I've been harping on for the entire paper, wide open paths afford better access and offer guidance through upland areas. So in some ways free-roaming elephants play the role in the unfolding social and political history in Asia. So to conclude, paths are important aspects of human and elephant niches. This paper asks that when understanding patterns of human behaviour we take into account indirect interaction with free-roaming elephants through co-constructed trails. The movement of both species in the difficult terrain in northeast India and beyond were in parts intertwined and coordinated. Human migration narratives, settlement patterns, social and political history were structured and afforded by elephant ecosystem engineering. And to colonise in the footsteps of elephants is to take part in historical traces of elephants with whom humans share place. So humans don't necessarily forge their own paths into the unknown, but as anthropologists tin ingot notes, very often humans take over where non-humans have left off. Thank you.