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Africa, Horn of

The Horn of Africa includes the modern states of Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Somalia. The region consists of temperate highlands surrounded by arid and semiarid lowlands and cut by a rift generating the Danakil Depression. The Horn is inhabited by Cushitic-, Semitic-, Omotic-, and marginally Nilo-Saharan-speaking peoples. The region has the longest cultural record in the world, from the earliest steps in human evolution to the present.

The Horn of Africa is one of the richest regions in Africa with respect to archaeological remains. They cover practically the whole time span from the beginning of the early Stone Age to the nineteenth century, and they reflect the very complex cultural history of the region. Despite this richness, archaeology in the Horn is still in its infancy and in many aspects backward when compared with other African regions. The Horn region is still largely unexplored archaeologically, and what work has been done has focused on only a few specific topics (early prehistory, rock art, megaliths, early historical monuments, medieval monuments), which has resulted in a very fragmentary view of the past of the region (Anfray 1990; Brandt 1986; Clark 1954).

Archaeological research in the Horn has a quite long history, with the earliest records of ancient monuments in northern Ethiopia and Eritrea going back to the early sixteenth century (Anfray 1963; Brandt and Fattovich 1990; Fattovich 1992; Mussi 1974–1975; Michels 1979). In a strictly historical perspective, three main phases (explorative, descriptive, interpretative) can be distinguished in the development of archaeological research in the region.

The explorative phase (ca. 1520–1900) was characterized by the activity of travelers and explorers who focused their attention on the ancient monuments visible in northern Ethiopia and Eritrea, mainly at Aksum, which was the capital of an early Christian kingdom dating to the first millennium a.d. The most eminent ones were F. Alvarez in the sixteenth century; C.J. Poncet in the seventeenth; J. Bruce in the eighteenth; and H. Salt, E. Ruppel, Th. Lefebvre, A. Raffray and G. Simon, and Th. Bent in the nineteenth. These explorers contributed to the popularization, at least in academic circles in Europe, of the existence of an ancient civilization in the region, and they set the foundations for historical archaeology in the Horn.

The descriptive phase (ca. 1900–1950) was characterized by the first semisystematic excavations and reconnaissances conducted by professional archaeologists in different regions of the Horn. G. Revoil was the first traveler to record the occurrence of ancient sites in northern Somalia in the late nineteenth century, and only Salt and Bent suggested some hypotheses about the origins of Ethiopian civilization (Brandt and Fattovich 1990; Fattovich 1992).

In Ethiopia and Eritrea, the most representative of these archaeologists were R. Bourg de Bozas (1906) and henri breuil and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, (Breuil 1934; Breuil, Teilhard de Chardin, and Wernet 1951), who collected the first Stone Age evidence in southern and eastern Ethiopia and rock-art evidence in eastern Ethiopia; H. Neuville (1928) and F. Azais (Azais and Chambard 1931), who investigated the megalithic monuments (dolmens, tumuli, stelae) in eastern, central, and southern Ethiopia; R. Paribeni (1907), E. Littmann, S. Krencker, and Th. von Lupke (1913), G. Dainelli and O. Marinelli (1912), and S.M. Puglisi (1940), who conducted surveys and excavations in Eritrea and Tigray (northern Ethiopia) and provided relevant knowledge of the ancient Aksumite civilization; A.A. Monti della Corte (1940), G. Bianchi Barriviera (1962, 1963), A. Mordini (1961, Mordini and Matthews 1959), and D. Buxton (1946, 1947, 1971), who systematically explored the medieval rock-hewn churches in northern Ethiopia.