Petrography of "Nderit" pottery from Pastoral Neolithic sites surrounding Lake Turkana in Kenya
Author(s): Edyta Marzec; Katherine Grillo; Peter Day
Year: 2015
Summary
"Nderit" pottery is associated with the earliest pastoralists in eastern Africa, c. 4000-4500 bp. and is found at both settlement sites and ritual "pillar sites" surrounding Lake Turkana in northwestern Kenya. Several of the known megalithic "pillar sites" are large communal cemeteries and contain very large numbers of Nderit sherds, yet little research has been carried out on these ceramics in terms of their technology or provenance.
Primary research questions concerning the early pastoralists of the Turkana Basin relate to issues regarding mobility and craft production; for example, did mobile herders produce this pottery on a household level as they moved throughout the Turkana Basin, or was craft production for ritual purposes more centralized and/or specialized? In the first phase of this project’s petrographic investigations, sherds from three sites – two pillar sites, Jarigole and Lothagam North, and one habitation site, Dongodien – were examined. Analysis demonstrates shared fabrics between domestic and mortuary sites, as well as fabric links between sites on both sides of Lake Turkana, providing important new information on pottery production and circulation, as well as the mobility of these early pastoralists.
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Cite this Record
Petrography of "Nderit" pottery from Pastoral Neolithic sites surrounding Lake Turkana in Kenya. Edyta Marzec, Peter Day, Katherine Grillo. Presented at The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, California. 2015 ( tDAR id: 397064)
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Keywords
General
"Nderit" pottery
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Ceramic Petrography
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Kenya
Geographic Keywords
AFRICA
Spatial Coverage
min long: -18.809; min lat: -38.823 ; max long: 53.262; max lat: 38.823 ;