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Aw Bare, Aiyanle and the medieval towns across the Somaliland–Ethiopia border, about 1400–1650
On the Ethiopian side of the border near Borama and Tog Wajaale, a Spanish, Somaliland and Ethiopian team recorded 19 medieval sites between 2022 and 2025, 15 of them new to research. They include the towns of Aw Bare, at least 33 hectares, and Aw Boba, the excavated village of Aiyanle, the hilltop fort of Sacmewey, and cemeteries and gathering places of nomads, one with a smelting area. Radiocarbon dates place Aiyanle's main use in the 1400s and 1500s and its end by the mid-1600s. The authors argue that the 1930s border split one medieval landscape in two, and that the sites belong with those of western Somaliland.
In short
The border between Somaliland and Ethiopia was drawn in the early 1930s. A recent report argues that it also split the study of one medieval landscape: sites on the Somaliland side were visited again and again, while those a few kilometres away in Ethiopia were known only by name. This page follows that report (de Torres Rodríguez, Rouco Collazo et al., "Breaking Borders: The Medieval Archaeology of the Ethiopian-Somaliland Borderland", African Archaeological Review 43, 2026, pp. 453–494, open access). Its authors come from the Incipit-CSIC institute in Spain, the National Museum of Somaliland, the Ethiopian Heritage Authority and universities in Ethiopia, Spain and Argentina.
The work took place in 2022, 2023 and 2025 in the Aw Bare and Harawo districts of Ethiopia's Somali Region, between Borama and Jigjiga. The team recorded 19 sites, 15 of them unpublished, opened about 250 square metres at Aiyanle and obtained twelve radiocarbon dates (pp. 455–456).
Why the border matters to the authors
The authors note that A. T. Curle, who worked on the boundary commission, recorded sites mostly on the British side, and that later visits followed the same pattern. By the 2020s, they write, Somaliland's medieval archaeology was "relatively well defined", while in Ethiopia "information was reduced to a series of names and some photographs". This, they argue, could wrongly "suggest that the core of the medieval settlement was located in Somaliland" (pp. 454–455). They describe the area as part of the sultanates of Ifat (1285–1408/09) and Barr Sa'd al-Din, or Adal (1408/09–1583) (p. 454).
The towns
- Aw Boba, near the village of Gocti, was seen by Richard Burton in 1854 and by Curle. The name appears in the 16th-century chronicle known as The Conquest of Abyssinia. The saint's tomb and mosques are still in use. Its cemetery has the widest range of grave types on the border, including carved headstones and one with a zig-zag pattern found nowhere else in the region. The authors note that Burton recorded oral traditions of a rivalry between Aw Boba and Abasa, 10 km away in Somaliland (pp. 457–458). See Abasa.
- Aw Bare lies under the modern village of the same name, on a natural route to Borama. The team traced at least 33 hectares of ruins, with walls more than 1.5 metres high in the market area and a medieval house holding later tombs beside the saint's shrine. Its 1-hectare cemetery holds only one grave type, the slab-lined cist, which the authors call exceptional (pp. 458–460).
Aiyanle: the excavated village
Aiyanle lies 3.5 km south-east of Aw Bare. It covers 1.6 hectares with about 50 houses of 35–50 square metres and two cemeteries. Low walls across the site are, the authors write, the first farming terraces found in the region (pp. 460–461).
The dig found two phases (pp. 461–464):
- The first phase, from about the mid-1400s into the 1500s, had well-built houses, Chinese porcelain, a Chinese coin, softstone vessels and a rotary millstone.
- The second phase had poorer walls, rooms turned into stores, no imported pottery and simple hand querns. The terraces were built over fallen houses in this phase. It also yielded a set of 14 bronze beads, whose closest parallels the authors place in the Ethiopian highlands.
The authors date the main use to the 1400s and 1500s, under the sultanate of Barr Sa'd al-Din, and the end of the village to the mid-1600s. They link the decline to the sultanate's collapse and suggest that people moved to Aw Bare, which they describe as "the only town in the region that survived" (p. 464).
A study of slopes, soils, water and satellite images of vegetation led them to conclude that farming was possible but limited, and "needed to be complemented by other activities, such as herding" (pp. 466–469).
Forts, hamlets and cemeteries
- Sacmewey is a walled hilltop of 90 by 75 metres at about 1,860 metres, above the pass of Ag Giogsi, or Gawa. Its wall is about 1.5 metres thick, with drains and a guarded southern gate. Inside is a building known as the tomb of Sheikh Sacmewey. The authors read its position as a marker between the bush to the north and the farmland of Tog Wajaale to the south (pp. 469–472).
- Garba Jirri (Curle's Derbile) is a compound of four houses and a mosque, still kept up by nomads who gather there each season (p. 472).
- Qararu is a hamlet of 3–4 houses with a medieval cemetery and a larger later one; a pre-Islamic cairn stands 200 metres away (pp. 472–474).
- Derbiga Gabra is a hilltop hamlet with a plastered mosque of 7.5 by 7.5 metres, the only plastered one known in the region, and a cemetery far larger than the hamlet (p. 474).
- Dooble is a cemetery of about 150 graves round a central structure, with no village (p. 475).
Nomad sites
West of Tog Wajaale, in Harawo district, the team found cemeteries with few or no buildings, which it links to nomads (p. 476).
- Dirri has graves edged with slabs and filled with white quartz, set beside open-air prayer places. The authors think they may be early Muslim nomad graves of the 12th–14th centuries, but say only excavation can tell (p. 476).
- Sheikh Woofle grew up round a saint's tomb. The authors interpret it as a seasonal gathering place for nomads. A small pit there held about 5 kg of iron slag, the first evidence of smelting found at a medieval Muslim site in the region. They link this to the Somali smiths known as tumaal, whom ethnographers describe as a low-status group (pp. 477–479, 486).
What was found
About 4,000 objects were collected, most of them local handmade pots and stone tools (p. 479). Imports were few. They included:
- Chinese blue-and-white porcelain and celadon.
- Speckled and white cream wares.
- A moulded sherd matching 12th–13th-century wares from Balis in Syria, the earliest import found.
- Polished pottery from the Ethiopian highlands.
- Glass perfume flasks, bangles and beads.
- Softstone vessels, probably from Arabia.
- Carnelian, probably from India.
- 41 cowries at Aiyanle alone (pp. 481–485).
The authors suggest that most trade goods "passed through the region" towards Harar and other markets, and that the local economy was "firmly rooted in an agropastoral system rather than trade" (p. 486).
How the authors read the evidence
- Farmers and nomads. They describe settled farmers and nomads living in "adjacent but differentiated territories", with Aw Bare, Sacmewey and Sheikh Woofle as the three main centres (pp. 487–488).
- Saints. Five of the 19 sites bear the names of holy men, and three more have central tombs with legends of sheikhs. The authors argue that Islam, and the tombs of saints in particular, gave settled and nomadic people "a shared religious identity", and that these shrines outlived the towns after the sultanate fell (pp. 489–490). See Medieval Muslim graves.
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