Ancient Burial Pits Reveal Sophisticated Rituals
Roughly 5,300 years ago, a group of ancient sheep herders in East Africa began an extraordinary effort to care for their dead.
It was a time of great upheaval in their homeland. Global climate changes had weakened the African monsoon system, causing a significant drop in rainfall. Pastoralism spread south from the Sahara. What is now known as Lake Turkana in northern Kenya shrank by half over the succeeding centuries.
These early herders dug through about 1,000 square feet of beach sands down to bedrock and gouged out burial pits. They interred their dead there: the bodies of men, women and children of all ages, many with personal items and ornamentation.
When the crevices they had dug into the bedrock filled up, the herders piled bodies on top of the pits, carefully placing large rocks over the heads and torso of each corpse. They did this for about 700 years, burying at least 580 people and perhaps 1,000 in all, according to a study published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. ...
Then, for reasons scientists don’t understand, at about the same time that Lake Turkana stopped shrinking, the people decided to stop burying their dead this way. The pit wasn’t yet full. But the herders covered it over with pebbles and then, to mark the spot, somehow managed to drag a dozen giant basalt pillars to the site from a kilometer or more away.
“Once the landscape was stabilized, perhaps these social anchors became less important,” said Elisabeth Hildebrand, the paper’s lead author and an associate professor of anthropology at Stony Brook University in New York. ...
The place, now called the Lothagam North Pillar Site, was never used as a burial site again, and lay virtually undisturbed until an international team of researchers, led by Dr. Hildebrand and Katherine Grillo ... , began to examine it.
There are five other sites around the lake with similar pillar markings, and previous research by another group suggests that at least one of them was also used as a monumental cemetery.
The new paper covers the results of digging deep into and at the fringes of the site during the summers of 2012, 2013 and 2014. The researchers also used ground-penetrating radar surveys to examine its dimensions. ...
“From start to finish, over a period of what was at least several centuries, people were demonstrating a high degree of intentionality and planning and careful implementation of this idea that everybody should be buried together in this singular location,” Dr. Hildebrand said. ...
This idea turns on its head the longstanding notion that it was only after people urbanized that they became organized enough to build complex structures, like cemeteries, said Susan McIntosh, a professor of anthropology at Rice University in Houston, who was not involved in the research.
“In archaeology, we used to think we understood that monumental constructions were associated with sedentism and food and-or labor surpluses commandeered by elites,” Dr. McIntosh said. “This was part of mainstream narratives about the ‘rise of civilization.’”
But excavations of sites like Lothagam North, Gobekli Tepe in Turkey and Poverty Point in Louisiana show that ancient mobile populations could also build monumental works, Dr. McIntosh said. ...
