Excavations at eastern Africa鈥檚 oldest and biggest cemetery offer a new perspective on the reasons why ancient humans built great monuments.
The Lothagam North Pillar Site is a communal cemetery built around 5000 years ago near Lake Turkana, Kenya, by the region鈥檚 first herders. At the site there are听1.5-metre-tall stone pillars,听nine stone circles听and a vast 700 square metre raised platform mound,听together with听the remains of at least 580 people.
Researchers usually think such large structures听were听the work of stable, complex, hierarchical societies with surplus resources. Often, they were an advertisement of a chief鈥檚 power.
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But excavations听at Lothagam North Pillar Site suggest an alternative. The burials include people of both sexes and all ages, from newborns to the elderly, and there is little evidence that anyone at the site was treated differently after death. Most skeletons were adorned with ornaments such as ostrich shell beads and hippo ivory rings or bracelets. This indicates that the herders lived in a non-hierarchical society, where the resources were not dominated by a powerful elite.
鈥淭here is no evidence that anyone was more important than anyone else, that there was a chief or 鈥榖ig man鈥�,鈥� says Katherine Grillo of the University of Florida in Gainesville, who co-directed the excavation.
Mobile builders
It seems that the builders were small groups of mobile herders who came together to undertake the huge task of digging out the cemetery site. Back-of-the-envelope calculations show that is the equivalent of 50,000 trips lugging 10 litres of sand and rock. 鈥淭his is clearly beyond the scale of something constructed by an extended family,鈥� says Grillo.
So why did the herders go to such great lengths to build the cemetery? They had moved into the region at a time of great environmental change 鈥� water levels in Lake Turkana had dropped by 55 metres, for example. The researchers think the herders built the cemetery as a place to interact and strengthen social networks in the face of challenging conditions. 鈥淩eally, it鈥檚 all about cooperation. They were deliberately taking on tasks designed to bring groups of people together,鈥� says Grillo.
In other words, ancient monuments were not always result of top-down power, but听could also arise through bottom-up cooperation.
PNAS
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