Blue Highways: Evaluating Middle Stone Age Riverine-Based Foraging, Mobility, and Technology along the Trunk Tributaries of the Blue Nile

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

With National Science Foundation support, Drs. John Kappelman and Lawrence Todd and a team of US and Ethiopian scientists and students will conduct three years of archaeological, paleontological, and geological research in northwestern Ethiopia. Through a series of controlled excavations, the project evaluates evidence that Middle Stone Age (MSA) humans living along the upper reaches of the Blue Nile River's tributaries on the lowland slope of Ethiopia's northwestern plateau were adapted to a riverine-based foraging lifestyle focused on the exploitation of highly predictable and abundant fish, mollusks, and mammals that were seasonally concentrated around waterholes during the dry season. Once local foods were depleted, longer distance foraging forays along the channel to new waterholes functioned as a dry season "pump" to siphon MSA populations out along the rivers. Not only would these "blue highways" have provided predictable foods and fresh water, but movements from one waterhole to another would have effected population movements northward along the Nile corridor. Investigating archaeological sites in this never before studied region will add to the growing body of knowledge about MSA behaviors. Because the research area is located in the Horn of Africa, a region hypothesized to be one of the places where modern humans possibly originated, and within the Nile corridor, a potential migratory route, these new data will further test and refine models of modern human origins and migration. The intellectual merit of these focused excavations derives from their relevance to specific questions about human origins integrated within a larger study of the sedimentology, geochronology, and paleoenvironments. Taken together these data provide information of significance both to this research program, and to broader issues of African paleoecology. Absolute dating of the sedimentary sequences will provide a chronology for these sites so that the lithic assemblages and paleohabitat reconstructions can be compared with those from other MSA sites. The primary objective is to frame the paleoecological and paleoclimatic context of these MSA populations for a better understanding of their behavioral repertoire. Broader impacts of the study will be realized on several fronts. First, the project brings together a team of scientists and students from the US and Ethiopia in a research partnership that integrates a diverse set of disciplines including archaeology, physical anthropology, paleontology, paleobotany, isotope geochemistry, sedimentology, geochronology, and community-based involvement in cultural heritage management and preservation. Second, the project emphasizes international student education to develop expertise in transdisciplinary studies. It will conduct a field school with a curriculum that includes training in GIS and GPS, faunal identification, use-wear, and mapping and excavation techniques, and emphasize student research. Third, the project includes educational outreach with the local and regional communities to develop stakeholder engagement in long term cultural and natural heritage management and preservation. And fourth, the project partners with governmental and private development groups working in the area in order to ensure that the cultural heritage is respected, managed, and preserved. The project will help train a new generation of Ethiopian heritage management specialists.