Herders in east Africa 5,000 years ago lived in peaceful communities that shunned social hierarchies, communicated intensively and worked together to build massive cemeteries, new research by archaeologists has revealed.
Work by a team of US-based experts on a remote site near Lake Turkana in Kenya contradicts longstanding beliefs about the origins of the first civilizations. It suggests that early communities did not inevitably develop powerful elites or compete violently for scarce resources, but might have instead worked together to overcome challenges.
The study, led by Stony Brook University associate professor of anthropology Elisabeth Hildebrand, is based on more than a decade of work in the northwest of Kenya at the “Lothagam North pillar site,” a communal cemetery constructed and used over a period of several centuries from 4,000 to 5,000 years ago.
The archeologists discovered a platform 30m in diameter marked by megaliths. It had a large cavity in its center where the remains of at least 580 individuals had been placed close together.
Researchers studying the early history of agricultural societies believe that large groups of people built permanent monuments to reinforce identities based on a sense of shared history, ideals and culture.
This allowed communities to grow in size beyond immediate family or the relatively small number of individuals well-known to one another, leading to greater specialization, technological advances and prosperity.
However, the cemetery was constructed by mobile pastoralists — or nomads — and contains no evidence for the existence of social hierarchies. Human remains were tightly packed and their arrangement did not suggest any ranking or social priority. For example, men, women and even small children were buried with elaborate personal ornaments.
“When agrarian societies started to develop, hierarchies started to develop, too. Some people became more powerful and disparities in wealth and health and social circumstances emerged. So the big question is: Did the same thing happen in pastoral societies?” Hildebrand said.
“Lothagam North pillar site is the earliest known monumental site in eastern Africa ... built by the region’s first herders ... and gives us solid evidence that these pastoralists did, indeed, follow a different trajectory of social change. People came together in large numbers, probably expending blood, sweat and tears to build these large structures, but we have no evidence for hierarchy or social difference,” she said.
Lothagam North’s architects seemed to have faced highly uncertain environments as rainfall decreased and Lake Turkana receded, possibly leading to economic and social instability.
Yet, the burial of even small children with ornaments indicates that “everyone in the society was valued,” said Kate Grillo, codirector of the excavations and professor at the University of Florida. “This was a supposedly terrible period, with much harder environmental conditions than earlier periods, but instead of the conflict you would expect, we are seeing larger and tighter social networks.”
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