Learning From Scratch What The Environments Were Like As The Complexities Of Societies Changed In Eastern Tigrai

Summary

Home to Aksum and other highly-developed polities, the Tigrai Plateau is a leading contender for sub-Saharan Africa's richest center of ancient state formation. This and its susceptibility to environmental (climate and land cover) variation make the region compelling for evaluating whether environmental changes affected the trajectories of polities. Soils exposed by gullying are the longest continuous archives of environmental proxies in the region. Many proxies are affected by both climate and land cover. Results indicate that stable hydrogen isotopic (δ2H) analyses of specific land-plant derived n-alkanoic acid (n-alk) molecules in soil organic matter are most affected by precipitation. Furthermore, the rainfall inferences from δ2H n-alk values can clarify whether changes in other proxies were due to climate or land cover. Our isotopic, elemental, and micromorphological analyses of gully soils suggest that Pre-Aksumite and Aksumite polities emerged during wetter intervals but that anthropogenic influences on land cover may have been very different during each period. Our present challenge is to understand possible relationships between the complexity of settlements and their immediate environments. To meet this challenge, we are building local records of environmental change and coupling them to the emerging archaeological record of settlement characteristics in Mezber and Ona Adi.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• An Historical Ecological Approach to the Investigation of Early Social Complexity in the Horn of Africa: First Steps

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15296