The advent of herding in the Horn of Africa: New data from Ethiopia, Djibouti and Somaliland

Although early food production is not as well-studied in the Horn of Africa as in other regions of the world, recent archaeological and archaeozoological studies have yielded new data suggesting that pastoral societies emerged at the beginning of the 2nd millennium BCE - two millennia later than in the neighbouring regions of the Sahel, NW Kenya, and Yemen. Understanding the processes through which herding began in the Horn is a complex task due to region's geographic position between multiple possible sources areas for livestock, and its immense environmental diversity caused by variations in topography and rainfall. Considering new evidence from Djibouti, Somalia, and southwest Ethiopia in tandem with prior data from multiple parts of the Horn, this article proposes that the diffusion of herding occurred via different processes in different areas. Data from northern and western parts of the Horn suggest slow migration of Sudanese groups and/or dense contacts with transfer of techniques and practices, beginning in foothills near today's Sudan border and, at least in the North, slowly spreading deep into the highlands of the Horn. In the eastern part of the Horn of Africa, herding practices and pottery technology may have come from Yemen via contacts across the Red Sea, or from Sudan via contacts through the coastal plain of Eritrea and/or the northern highlands of the Horn; because ceramics are absent or of specific local design it is likely that herding began via selective adoption of domestic animals rather than through in-migration of pastoralists. In the southwestern highlands of Ethiopia, livestock and pottery (with no foreign influence) appear much later, at the end of the 1st millennium BCE. Several environmental factors may have helped maintain southwest Ethiopia as a cultural isolate where people had only a late interest in switching their subsistence to food production and where incorporation of livestock and ceramic production took place in longstanding, highly conservative, technological and economic systems. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd and INQUA. All rights reserved.