Delayed-Return Hunter-Gatherers in the Horn of Africa? Faunal and Radiometric Data from the Guli Waabayo Rock Shelter in Southern Somalia

Summary

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

Environmental changes during the African Humid Period (~11,000-5,000 BP) are associated with the emergence of new social and economic strategies among some hunter-gatherers in northern and eastern Africa. In response to Early Holocene climatic amelioration, foragers in southwestern Libya and the Lake Victoria Basin decreased their mobility and adopted delayed-return subsistence practices focused on certain wild, local resources. The range and extent of this move toward sedentism and resource localization among African hunter-gatherers, however, is unclear. Preliminary faunal evidence from Guli Waabayo, a Terminal Pleistocene/Early Holocene rock shelter site in southern Somalia, suggests foragers increasingly focused on net hunting and trapping small, territorial mammals such as dik-dik and hyrax throughout the site’s occupation. This paper presents detailed faunal data, artifact densities and new radiocarbon dates to investigate whether a trend toward small game hunting corresponds with decreased mobility and elevated rainfall levels observed regionally in the Early Holocene. Findings from this study will contribute to broader discussions about the range and prevalence of increasingly delayed-return hunter-gatherer strategies in northern and eastern Africa and their relationship to environmental transformations during the African Humid Period.

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): 25662