Investigating the 1930s Kohl-Larsen collection from the Lake Eyasi Basin, Tanzania

Abstract

Since more than 80 years, the University of Tübingen hosts the archaeological collections excavated by Margit and Ludwig Kohl-Larsen between 1934 and 1939 in modern-day Tanzania. Despite the great scientific relevance of these collections, most of them were never published on an international scale and were thus unavailable for the broader Africanist archaeological community. In the light of new excavations around Lake Eyasi, conducted jointly by the Universities of Dar es Salaam and Tübingen and the Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung, we decided to under­take a new inventory of the Kohl-Larsen collection, to analyze the assemblages using state of the art methods, link them with new excavation data and make them internationally available. As a first step, here we want to introduce the project by reporting on some preliminary observations from Njarasa Cave. Ultimately this research will help to create a coherent reconstruction of human cultural change and behavioral adaptions over the last ~200.000 years in this important archaeological landscape.