Lessons From a 5,000-Year-Old Kenyan Cemetery

Logatham North Pillar Site is upending old assumptions about why people make monuments.
BY CARA GIAIMO
AUGUST 21, 2018



ABOUT FIVE MILLENNIA AGO, BETWEEN 3000 and 2000 B.C., a man died somewhere near the shores of Lake Turkana in what is now Kenya. He had lived during what we, with the benefit of hindsight, can characterize as a time of turmoil. In the centuries before, his community of sheep, goat, and cow herders had moved to the Turkana area from the Sahara, driven southwest as their former home turned from a lush, green landscape into the desert we know today. There, they might have met a group of foragers and fishers—themselves likely stressed out because their lake was shrinking. All would have somehow had to learn to live together, changing as their environment changed.

We may not know the specifics of his life, but from what we know of his community’s burial practices, we can reconstruct what happened after. When this man died, his community members likely arranged his body into a specific position, and bound it tightly in cloth. They carried it up a winding trail to the top of a hill. There, they laid it alongside the bodies of hundreds of other community members who had passed away: men, women and children, all buried next to each other in a giant cavity dug into the sand and bedrock. They left this particular man with what archaeologists assume was one of his prized possessions: an intricate headpiece made out of 405 gerbil teeth, plucked from at least 113 individual gerbils.

The man was buried at what is now known as Lothagam North Pillar Site, the largest monumental cemetery in Eastern Africa. In a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of researchers describes what they’ve discovered about the site over the course of a decade of excavation and study. Their findings shed light on the memorializing practices of this particular society, and are helping to revise ideas about why people make monuments at all.

Lothagam North Pillar Site is located on the southwest edge of the lake, a little over four miles from its shore. After they stopped burying people in the cavity, the community filled it in with rubble and topped it with round basalt pebbles. They then ornamented the surrounding area with stone circles, pillars, and cairns, all highly visible against a background of red sandstone and black basalt. Five thousand years ago, “it would have been on the very edge of Lake Turkana,” says Elizabeth Sawchuk, the project’s lead bioarchaeologist and one of the paper’s authors. “It would have been jutting into the lake, almost like a peninsula. It would have been absolutely spectacular to look at.”

More:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/ancient-monument-cemetery-kenya