There were also interesting contributions to archaeology in Eritrea by a few Italian residents on the plateau (A. Piva, G. Davico, and V. Franchini), and information about lithic industries collected by Italian officers and residents in Ethiopia after the occupation of the country was published by A.C. Blanc (1955, Blanc and Tavani 1938). This research largely expanded the knowledge of ancient Ethiopia, but it was descriptive and typologically oriented, and there was no real effort to build cultural sequences. Only C. Conti Rossini (1928) attempted to set the different kinds of archaeological evidence into a coherent historical context.

In this phase, British scholars (J. W. Crowfoot, L.P. Kirwan, and A.J. Arkell) also started to explore the northwestern Ethiopian-Sudanese lowlands (Arkell 1954; Crowfoot 1911). These investigations revealed the occurrence of late prehistoric, Hellenistic, and early Islamic sites in the lowlands and on the Red Sea coast. In Somalia, relevant research was conducted by Italian (G. Stefanini and N. Puccioni, L. Cipriani, E. Cerulli, and P. Graziosi), French (P. Teilhard de Chardin), and British (C. Barrington, A.T. Curle, and J.D. Clark) scholars. In particular, during the 1930s, Cerulli and Curle recorded the occurrence of ancient indigenous and early Islamic monuments in northern Somalia, Graziosi (1940) carried out systematic excavations in southern Somalia, and Clark (1954) provided the first comprehensive outline of the Stone Age sequence in the Horn.

The interpretative phase (from ca. 1950) started with the creation of the Ethiopian Institute of Archaeology, based in Addis Ababa under the supervision of French scholars, in 1952. This phase is characterized by large-scale excavations at the major sites as part of well-defined research projects aimed at enlightening the different periods of regional prehistory and ancient history. A relevant aspect of this phase is a more direct involvement of local scholars with the research and conservation of the archaeological heritage. The most important aspect of this phase has been the attempt by different scholars to suggest a reconstruction of the region’s past from a cultural-historic and/or a processual perspective (see Anfray 1968, 1990; Begashaw 1994; Brandt 1984, 1986; Clark 1988; Fattovich 1988, 1990a; Michels 1994).

In Ethiopia and Eritrea, a crucial role was played by the resident French Archaeological Mission, cooperating with the Ethiopian Institute of Archaeology, under the successive direction of J. Leroy, J. Leclant, J. Doresse, H. de Contenson, and F. Anfray, with R. Schneider as epigrapher. These scholars mainly contributed to an outline of the early historical cultural sequence in northern Ethiopia and Eritrea on the basis of fieldwork at sites such as Aksum, Haulti, Melazo, Yeha in northern Ethiopia and Matara in Eritrea (see Anfray 1968, 1990). In the field of historical archaeology, other important contributions derived from the excavations at Aksum in northern Ethiopia and its immediate surrounding area made by N.H. Chittick (1974; Munro-Hay 1989) and L. Ricci (Ricci and Fattovich 1988) as well as from a survey of the Aksum-Yeha region made by J. Michels (1994). In the early 1970s, C. Lepage (1975) resumed the systematic study of the rock-hewn churches in northern Ethiopia. Attention was also paid to the megaliths of eastern, central, and southern Ethiopia by R. Joussaume (1980) and F. Anfray (1982) and to the rock art by P. Graziosi (1964) and P. Cervicek (1971). G. Bailloud, J. Dombrowski (1970), C. Roubet (1970), J. Gallagher (1972), H. Faure (Faure, Gasse, Roubet, and Taieb 1976), and D.W. Phillipson (1977) contributed to the knowledge of the late prehistory of the country.

By the mid-1960s, greater interest in the Stone Age developed due to fieldwork of J. Chavaillon (1968, 1988) at Melka Konture in central Ethiopia, the International Omo Project in the Omo Valley (Coppens, Howell, Isaac, and Leakey 1976), F. Wendorf in the Rift Valley (Wendorf and Schild 1974), and J.D. Clark in the Afar (Brandt 1980; Clark and Williams 1978). In the early 1970s, the first chair of Ethiopian archaeology anywhere in the world was established in Naples, Italy, at the Istituto Universitario Orientale, and in the mid-1970s, human paleontology become the main field of research after the discovery of the earliest hominid remains in the Afar (eastern Ethiopia) by D. Johanson and M. Taieb. In the 1980s, archaeological