Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-07T06:30:47.411Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Cushitic and Nilotic Prehistory: New Archaeological Evidence from North-West Kenya

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

B. M. Lynch
Affiliation:
Southern Illinois University
L. H. Robbins
Affiliation:
Michigan State University

Extract

Recent archaeological research conducted west of Lake Turkana, Kenya has shed new light on the prehistory of eastern Cushitic and Nilotic speakers in East Africa. The Namoratunga cemetery and rock art sites, dated to about 300 B.C., are clearly related to the prehistory of Eastern Cushitic speakers. The newly defined Turkwell cultural tradition, dated to the first millennium a.d., is associated with eastern Nilotic prehistory. Lopoy, a large lakeside fishing and pastoralist settlement, is discussed in terms of eastern Nilotic prehistory. The archaeological data agrees with the independent findings of historical linguistics.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1979

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Phillipson, D. W., ‘The spread of the Bantu language’, Scientific American, ccxxxvi, iv (1977), 106–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Murdock, G. P., Africa, Its Peoples and Their Culture History (New York, 1959).Google Scholar

3 For further discussion see Huntingford, G. W. B., ‘The Peopling of the Interior of East Africa by its Modern Inhabitants’, in History of East Africa, ed. Oliver, R. and Mathew, G. (Oxford, 1968), i, 5893.Google Scholar

4 Reasons for rejecting the Nilo-Hamitic linguistic classification are detailed in Greenberg, J. H., The Languages of Africa, chapters iiiiv (Bloomington, 1966)Google Scholar. Also see Ehret, C., ‘Cushites and the Highland and Plains Nilotes’, in Zamani: A Survey of East African History, ed. Ogot, B. A. and Kieran, J. A. (Nairobi, 1968), 158–76.Google Scholar

5 Ehret, C., ‘Cushitic’ in The Non-Semitic Languages of Ethiopia, ed. Bender, M. L., Ethiopian Monograph series number 5 (East Lansing, 1976), 8596Google Scholar; idem, Southern Nilotic History (Evanston, 1971).

6 Loc. cit.

7 Research was funded by the National Science Foundation. We thank the government of Kenya for granting permission to do this research. We are grateful to R. E. F. Leakey, J. C. Onyango-Abuje, D. Phillipson and N. Chittick for facilitating our fieldwork. In addition we thank P. Uland and J. N. Ochieng for their drawings.

8 Ehret, , ‘Cushitic’.Google Scholar

9 Lynch, B. M., ‘Preliminary report on the 1975–76 excavations at Namoratunga’, Azania, xii (1977), 203–8Google Scholar; idem, ‘The Namoratunga cemetery and rock art sites of NW Kenya: a study of early pastoralist social organization’, Ph.D. dissertation (1978), Michigan State University.

10 Lynch, B. M. and Robbins, L. H., ‘Animal Brands and the Interpretation of Rock Art in East Africa’, Current Anthropology, xviii, iii (1977), 538–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Lynch, B. M. and Donahue, R., ‘A statistical analysis of two East African rock art sites’, Journal of Field Archaeology (in press).Google Scholar

12 For a description of East African burial cairns see Sutton, J. E. G., The Archaeology of the Western Highlands of Kenya, memoir number 3 of the British Institute in Eastern Africa (Nairobi, 1973). chapter iv.Google Scholar

13 Cole, S., The Prehistory of East Africa (revised edition) (New York, 1963).Google Scholar

14 Hallpike, C., The Konso of Ethiopia: A Study of the Values of a Cushitic People (Oxford, 1973).Google Scholar

15 In Jensen, E., Im Lande des Gada (Stuttgart, 1936)Google Scholar. Hallpike, op. cit.

16 Gulliver, P. H., The Family Herds: A Study of two Pastoral Tribes in East Africa, the Jie and Turkana (London, 1955).Google Scholar

17 Merker, M., Die Masai (Berlin, 1910).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 Jensen, op. cit. Huntingford, G. W. B., ‘The hagiolithic cultures of East AfricaEastern Anthropologist, iii, 119–36.Google Scholar

19 Lynch, B. M. and Robbins, L. H., ‘Namoratunga: the first archaeo-astronomical evidence in subsaharan AfricaScience, 200 (19 May 1978), 766–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 Legesse, A., Gada: Three Approaches to the Study of African Society (New York, 1973).Google Scholar

21 This date is firmly supported by the archaeo-astronomical evidence mentioned above (see Lynch and Robbins, ‘Namoratunga’, for further details). The alignments agree for the year 300 b.c., but differences are evident when more recent dates are used in the comparison. For this reason, as well as the historical linguistic data bearing on eastern Cushitic prehistory another radiocarbon date from Namoratunga of 1200 ± 100 b.p. (UCLA 21240) is assumed to be in error.

22 Ehret, C., Ethiopians and East Africans: The Problem of Contacts, Nairobi Historical Studies 3 (Nairobi, 1974)Google Scholar; idem, ‘Cushitic’ (1976).

23 Greenberg, , Languages.Google Scholar

24 The earlier archaeological history of the Nilotic speakers is not known; however, the Lake Turkana basin may have figured prominently as a general homeland for the ancestral Nilotes before they diversified. See Ehret, , Southern Nilotic HistoryGoogle Scholar and Ochieng, W. R., An Outline History of the Rift Valley of Kenya (Nairobi, 1975)Google Scholar, for discussion of this point. It should be noted that the early Holocene fishing peoples who occupied the Lothagam Hill area between 6,000 and 7,000 years ago show some physical similarities to modern Nilotes. This is discussed in Angel, J. L., Phenice, T. W., Robbins, L. H. and Lynch, B. M., Late Stone Age Fishermen of Lothagam, Kenya, Michigan State UniversityGoogle Scholar, Museum Anthropological series (in press). In addition, the overall distribution pattern of early Holocene fishing communities known from wavy line pottery and bone spear or harpoon points corresponds remarkably well to the present distribution of the Nilo-Saharan language group as a whole. See discussion of this in Sutton, J. E. G., ‘The African Aqualithic’, Antiquity, li (1977), 2535CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Furthermore, some of the earliest domesticated livestock known for eastern Africa has recently been recovered from the east Lake Turkana area (Barthelme, J., personal communicationGoogle Scholar).

25 Jacobs, A. H., ‘Maasai Pastoralism in Historical Perspective’, in Pastoralism in Tropical Africa, ed. Monod, T. (International African Institute, London, 1975).Google Scholar

26 Ehret, , Southern Nilotic HistoryGoogle Scholar. Ochieng, , Rift Valley, p. 28.Google Scholar

27 A complete inventory of sites is presented in Robbins, L. H., The Lopoy Site, Michigan State University Museum, Anthropological Series (in press)Google Scholar. Similar pottery also is known from sites in the Lake Hannington area. See Farrand, W. R., Redding, R. W., Wolpoff, M. H. and Wright, H. T. III, An Archaeological Investigation of the Loboi Plain, Baringo District, Kenya, Technical Reports 4, Research Reports in Archaeology, Contribution 1 (Ann Arbor, 1976).Google Scholar

28 Robbins, L. H., ‘Archaeology in the Turkana District, Kenya’, Science, clxxvi (1972), 359–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 Robbins, L. H., The Lopoy Site (in press).Google Scholar

30 See Lamphear, J. E., The Traditional History of the Jie of Uganda (London, 1976).Google Scholar

31 Ehret, , Southern Nilotic History.Google Scholar

32 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., The Nuer (London, 1940).Google Scholar

33 Another archaeological component is evident at a different part of the Lopoy site. This is a hunting and butchering camp associated with a distinctive kind of pottery that contrasts with the Turkwell tradition. See Robbins, L. H. and Lynch, B. M., ‘New evidence on the use of microliths from the Lake Turkana Basin, East Africa’, Current Anthropology, xix, iii, 619–20.Google Scholar

34 Ogot, B. A., History of the Southern Luo, 1 (Nairobi, 1967), 41–2.Google Scholar

35 Phillipson, , ‘Bantu language’Google Scholar; idem, The Later Prehistory of Eastern and Southern Africa, chapters 6–8 (London, 1977). Soper, R. C., ‘A general review of the Early Iron Age in the Southern half of Africa’, Azania, vi, 537.Google Scholar