Turkana Basin Institute

In July 2007 a team from Stony Brook University conducted a reconnaissance in West Turkana of sites in the Galana Boi Formation dating to, 9000-4000 years ago. During this period the early Holocene), the people living around Turkana undertook two major innovations.

First, c. 9000 years ago, they developed an intensive fishing and hunting adaptation, one that left behind barbed bone harpoons, flexed burials, and some of the earliest pottery in East Africa. Thousands of years later, they began herding cattle, sheep, and goats, acquired from Sahara and Sahel regions to the north.

This reconnaissance is the first stage of a larger project, "The Later Prehistory of West Turkana", directed by Professors John Shea and Elisabeth Hildebrand, that will investigate when, why and how these innovations occurred. Professor Shea is interested in how stone tool production accommodates changes in peoples’ economy and settlement patterns focus. Professor Hildebrand studies the beginnings of herding and farming in several areas of northeast Africa, and examines how prehistoric changes in food-getting strategies may have affected social structure.

The small team left Nairobi 15 July for a 2.5-week reconnaissance near Lodwar, Kalakol, Lothagam, and the lower Kerio Valley. The main aims for this trip were to relocate and georeference sites documented in the 1970s and 1980s, to devise a system for surveying Holocene deposits near the lake, and to become acquainted with local people and living conditions. Active participation by local people is vital to the long-term success of TBI endeavors.

Informal surveys bore out earlier reports that the area boasts a wealth of Holocene sites. We relocated many significant sites documented before GPS technology became available, and discovered several new sites in different locations and environmental settings. The latter include pottery- and harpoon-bearing sites in ancient beach deposits probably used by hunter-gatherer fishers, and a “pillar site,” containing standing stones, probably constructed by early herders.

Hildebrand, Shea, and TBI post-doctoral fellow Veronica Waweru are currently developing a long term strategy for Holocene research. They are returning to West Turkana during summer 2008 for more formal survey, and possibly test excavations. The Later Prehistory of West Turkana Project will augment past and ongoing research on the East side of the lake, creating, in the long run, as rich a record for the Early Holocene as there is for earlier periods in the Turkana Basin.