Glossary

Early Common Era Refers to the period between 100 BC and 100 CE that witnessed a significant increase in interregional and transoceanic trade linking the Indian Ocean world, East and Central Asia, and the Mediterranean and also the rise of stable empires and states in Asia, Southern Europe, and Africa. vertical archipelago effect First described in the Andes but also in the Himalayas and Hawaii; rapidly changing elevations

Within a relatively small lateral area causes highly variable yet circumscribed environment and leads to the development of interdependent and exchanging settlements along the vertical landscape practicing a wide variety of subsistence

Activities.

The Horn of Africa is a cultural area comprising the modern nations of Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia. Archaeological research over the past century shows an unbroken sequence of human occupation from the Middle Stone Age to the present. It has also been blessed with a unique location: on the crossroads of Asia and Africa, at the mouth of the Red Sea, and offering easy land access between western ports on the Red Sea and the Nile River. Epigraphic evidence from Egypt identifies this region as Punt and an active trading partner of Egypt during the reign of Queen Hapshetsut. Archaeological evidence suggests that the trade links between the Horn of Africa and the Mediterranean world (Egypt) as well as Southwest Asia can be traced as far back as 2500 BC.

The Horn of Africa boasts greater geographical diversity than any other area in Africa: from the baking plains along the Eritrean and Somali coasts, the largest and highest land plateau, the cooler Ethiopian highlands, the lowland tropical Nile headwaters to the north, and the arid dry lowlands to the northwestern, western, and southwestern regions along the borders with Sudan and Kenya. The wider range of geographic and hence climatic variability creates a ‘vertical archipelago’ effect allowing for a larger variety of sustainable resources and related subsistence activities, and the contemporaneous development of a regional exchange network between settlements. The Somali Coast (that includes the actual ‘horn’ or the jutting coastal plain along the Gulf of Aden and the northwestern Indian Ocean), the Eritrean (and Djiboutian) Coast along the Western Red Sea, and the Ethiopian highlands have thus been interconnected from earliest times and this regional exchange has played a great role in the development of social complexity in the Horn from 800 BC onward.

The Horn of Africa is also the region of many ‘firsts’ and ‘onlys’. Important food crops such as teff, ensete, finger millet, nug, and coffee were first domesticated in the Ethiopian highlands and this is the only region in sub-Saharan Africa to use domesticated cattle and the plow for agricultural purposes. ‘Geez’ is one of the three indigenous writing systems in Africa and was developed during the development of the Aksumite polity. This region is also home to a two millennia long development of incipient state formation in sub-Saharan Africa: from Aksum (also called Axum) (second century BC to ninth century CE), Zagwe (tenth century to fourteenth century CE), Solomonid (fourteenth century to seventeenth century), and Amharic Gondar (seventeenth century to twentieth century). The monarchs of these polities have practiced and hailed themselves as the ‘protectors’ of Christianity from the conversion of King Ezana of Aksum in CE 330, to the Amhara kings of the twentieth century, making the Ethiopian highlands the longest-lived Christian-ruled area in the world.

Consequently, much focus of historical research has been on this indigenous adoption of and syncretic processes affecting Christianity, regarding the aforementioned highland states as islands of Christianity pitted against indigenous religions and later against Islamic incursions from the coasts. This paradigm is now being challenged as the positive contributions of traditional African religions and Islam are being acknowledged, as are the impacts of nonChristian peoples of the Horn, including the Somali, the Oromo (formerly called the Galla), the Afar, and the Saho.

Recent historical and archaeological work on the antiquity and spread of Islam has underscored the role played by Asian and African Islamic traders and settlers in Red Sea ports, including Adulis, Massawa, the Dahlak Islands on the Eritrean Coast, and Berbera, Zeila, Ras Hafun, and Mogadishu on the Somali Coast. The Dahlak Islands, Adulis, Berbera, and Ras Hafun have been active since the Early Common Era and played a significant role in the rise of Aksum and the latter highland polities. Trade goods recovered in both the coastal ports as well as Aksum (and subsequent states) include products from South Asia (glass beads, coins, cloth), Rome (ceramics, amphorae), Egypt, and even China (iron, porcelains, silk). In return, the highland and coastal ports provided infrastructure for secondary production and regional and transoceanic trade in food grains, animal products such as elephant and hippopotamus tusk ivory (raw, cut, and carved), skins and hides, precious stones, rock crystals, gold, slaves, beeswax, and gum Arabic. Emergent trends and future directions of archaeological research seem to favor this regional approach for understanding social complexity.

The rest of this essay will summarize the recent archaeological-historical work along the three zones of the Horn of Africa: (1) the Northern Coast along the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden (Eritrean, Djiboutian, and northern Somali Coasts); (2) the Southeastern Somali Coast, also known as the Benadir Coast (along the northwestern Indian Ocean); and (3) the Eritrean-Ethiopian highlands. The bulk of archaeological work in the Horn has concentrated on the highlands but there have been a few projects working on the coasts, tied into the larger coastal archaeological projects further south along the East African coast.