Era
The Stone Age in the Somali lands: Buur Heybe, Gogoshiis Qabe, Guli Waabayo and the Hargeisan
People have lived in the Somali lands since the Stone Age. The best-dated sites are rock shelters on the granite hill of Buur Heybe in Bay region, where radiocarbon dates show people returning to Guli Waabayo shelter over about 20,000 years, from roughly 29,000 to 6,000 years ago. Somalia's first archaeological excavation was dug there in 1935, and in the north, the deep layers under the Laas Geel paintings hold stone tools from the end of the last Ice Age.
In short
Long before herders painted cattle at Laas Geel, hunter-gatherers lived in the Somali lands. Their stone tools, the bones of the animals they ate and their burials survive in rock shelters and open sites. Most of what is known comes from two places: the inselbergs (buur) of the inter-riverine south, between the Shabelle and Jubba rivers, and the granite hills of the north around Hargeisa.
The Buur region: Somalia's first excavation
Buur Heybe, in Bay region, is the largest of the granite inselbergs that rise from the flat bushland between the two rivers. Its name has been translated as "the hill of the potter's sand", and it was studied for its living pottery tradition as well as its past (Belkin, Brandt and Noor, The Potters of Buur Heybe, Somalia, Left Coast Press, 2006).
- 1935. The Italian archaeologist Paolo Graziosi dug the rock shelter of Gogoshiis Qabe on Buur Heybe, Somalia's first professional excavation. He named three stone tool industries, the lowest Middle Stone Age and the highest Late Stone Age and the last he called the "Eibian" (Brandt, "Early Holocene mortuary practices and hunter-gatherer adaptations in southern Somalia", World Archaeology, 1988).
- 1940s. The British archaeologist J. Desmond Clark dug the shelter of Guli Waabayo on Buur Heybe and the open-air Rifle Range Site on nearby Buur Hakaba. In 1954 he published The Prehistoric Cultures of the Horn of Africa, the first overall sequence for the region (Jones, Brandt and Marshall 2018; Gutherz et al. 2014).
- 1980s. Steven Brandt led the Buur Ecological and Archaeological Project with Somali colleagues. Brandt argued in 1986 that most of Clark's culture units were "in need of revision" (Brandt, "The Upper Pleistocene and early Holocene prehistory of the Horn of Africa", African Archaeological Review, 1986).
- 1989. Fieldwork in the south stopped as the war spread. Much of the excavated material had been exported for study with the approval of the Somali Academy of Sciences; collections left in the Somali National Museum were lost when the museum was looted (Jones, Brandt and Marshall, Quaternary International, 2018).
How old? The Guli Waabayo dates
New radiocarbon dates published in 2021, made on ostrich eggshell and animal tooth enamel, show "repeated use of the site over a ~20,000-year period". The authors find two main periods of use (Jones, Brandt, Henry and Ambrose, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 2021):
- About 29,000–26,000 to 15,000–11,000 years ago, during the coldest and driest part of the last Ice Age, with stone tools of the Eibian industry. They call these "the earliest radiometric evidence of Later Stone Age (LSA) occupation in the southeastern Horn of Africa".
- About 11,000–9,000 to 7,500–6,000 years ago, in the early and middle Holocene, with tools of the Bardaale industry.
At the Rifle Range Site on Buur Hakaba, hunter-gatherers relied on the inselbergs, on big game and on dwarf antelope (dik-dik) from about 20,000 to 5,000 years ago (Jones, Brandt and Marshall 2018).
Brandt's 1988 study described burials of the early Holocene at Buur Heybe and what they show about how hunter-gatherers lived (Brandt 1988).
A greener Horn: the African Humid Period
Between about 14,000 and 5,000 years ago, north and eastern Africa "were much wetter and greener than they are today". Oxygen isotopes in dik-dik and warthog teeth from Gogoshiis Qabe and Guli Waabayo were used to track how dry the land was over that time (Reid, Jones, Brandt et al., Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 2019). A marine core from the Gulf of Aden shows that the shifts into and out of this wet period were abrupt, happening "within centuries rather than over millennia" (Tierney and deMenocal, Science 342, 2013).
The wild animals painted in northern rock art, such as giraffes, which are no longer found there, fit this greener past. Sada Mire writes that the hunting scenes "suggest a mixed economy and much greener environment than the region offers today" (Mire 2015, African Archaeological Review 32).
The north: the Hargeisan and Laas Geel Shelter 7
Clark defined a "Hargeisan" industry from sites near Hargeisa, mixing Middle and Late Stone Age traits, and a later "Somaliland Wilton". The French team that recorded the Laas Geel paintings dug Shelter 7 and found two phases. The upper layers held Late Stone Age microliths. The lower layers combined Late Stone Age blades with "a Levallois technology", a Middle Stone Age method, which "supports a comparison with the 'Hargeisan Industry'" and dates to the end of the Pleistocene (Gutherz, Diaz, Ménard, Bon et al., "The Hargeisan revisited", Quaternary International 343, 2014).
Mire lists other northern Stone Age sites still to be studied: Lukuud near Aw-Barkhadle, and Gumburaha and Aqalo-lamoodka near Dhubato in Hargeisa region (Mire 2015).
From hunting to herding
The next chapter is the first herders, whose cattle, sheep and goats appear in the rock art of the north from about the 3rd millennium BC. See Laas Geel and Somali rock art.
Related pages
Sources
- Belkin, Brandt and Noor, The Potters of Buur Heybe, Somalia, Left Coast Press, 2006 · search.worldcat.org
- Brandt, "Early Holocene mortuary practices and hunter-gatherer adaptations in southern Somalia", World Archaeology, 1988 · doi.org
- Jones, Brandt and Marshall 2018 · doi.org
- Gutherz et al. 2014 · doi.org
- Brandt, "The Upper Pleistocene and early Holocene prehistory of the Horn of Africa", African Archaeological Review, 1986 · doi.org
- Jones, Brandt, Henry and Ambrose, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 2021 · doi.org
- Reid, Jones, Brandt et al., Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 2019 · doi.org
- Tierney and deMenocal, Science 342, 2013 · doi.org
- Mire 2015, African Archaeological Review 32 · link.springer.com
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