Lithic technological strategies of the earliest herders at Lake Turkana, northern Kenya

Steven T Goldstein

doi:10.15184/aqy.2019.178

Abstract

Highlights

Past societies around the world repeatedly reconfigured their technologies to accommodate the challenges and opportunities of novel food-production strategies
This analysis demonstrates that communities who lived at Dongodien, and those who constructed and used the Jarigole and Lothagam North pillar sites, all shared a distinct technological tradition that set them apart from other Late Stone Age sites in the region
Herders at all three sites employed the same chaîne opératoire to produce morphologically consistent blade cores and bladelet blanks for formal tools from obsidian, while local raw materials were reduced and used expediently for informal tools. This contrasts with Early Holocene hunter-gatherer-fisher assemblages, which attest the manufacture of diverse microlithic and large-flake toolkits on local cherts and basalts

Summary

Introduction

Past societies around the world repeatedly reconfigured their technologies to accommodate the challenges and opportunities of novel food-production strategies. To understand the conditions that structured the lithic choices of ancient herders around Lake Turkana, I analysed lithic material from all three early herding sites that, to date, have yielded large, securely dated, tool and debitage assemblages. These are the single habitation site of Dongodien (Barthelme 1981; Ashley et al 2017) and the pillar-cemetery sites at Jarigole and Lothagam North (Nelson 1995; Hildebrand et al 2011, 2018). Despite minor differences in ratios, the overall consistency in tool types, morphologies and sizes across all three sites suggest that they reflect the same toolkit and tool-use strategies

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion