From Minerology to Monuments: Place-Making through Personal Ornamentation in mid-Holocene Turkana, Kenya

Summary

This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Beads play a prominent role in personal ornamentation in life and death: desired, exploited, and widely traded throughout prehistory. Although manufacture and use provide important social context, evaluating the materials used and their source locations is a crucial component of understanding how these industries arise. This paper features an unusual stone bead industry from Lake Turkana, Kenya associated with the first pastoralists in East Africa 5,000 years ago that rivals the mineralogical complexity of its global counterparts. Excavations at the sites of Lothagam North and Manemanya suggest these were mortuary monuments built by mobile pastoralists people who exploited a number of geological sources extensively to adorn their dead without the direction of dictation of a ruler or state. Stone beads found at these sites, in tandem with previously curated collection from another nearby site, Jarigole, provide contrast to the bead industries that emerge in agricultural and state societies. Through an examination of the minerology and sourcing of the beads, we argue this bead making phenomenon represents a significant investment in material elaboration when social values were under renegotiation, with a time, location, and context not currently considered in archaeominerological literature.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• African Archaeology throughout the Holocene   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23275