Former Field

• Kenya, West Turkana

My research in Kenya has been framed into the in-Africa Project.

In Africa has been a five-year research programme to investigate the origins of our species - Homo sapiens - and its diversity in Africa, funded through an Advanced Investigator Award from the European Research Council (ERC) to Marta Mirazon Lahr. It aims at making new discoveries of early human fossils, archaeological sites and their environmental context in East Africa to test models of human origins and diversification in Africa. In Africa has two field projects in Kenya – one focused on the Turkana Basin and one on the Central Rift Valley.

I joined the In-Africa team in 2013 and I am among the specialists studying MSA sites in the south eastern part of the Lake Turkana (Kalakoel 3, Lomanimania among others).

For more informations, please visit the in-Africa page.

• Sudan, Al Jamrab

The (H)ORIGIN project was involved in Sudan as a sub-project within the Italian Archaeological Mission in Central Sudan. This started in 2000, originally as a project of the IsIAO (Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente) and now of the Centro Studi Sudanesi e Sub-Sahariani (ONLUS) . It focuses on an area, on the White Nile and the territory west of it, which had been highly neglected by systematic exploration. Main project collaborators are Italian Universities of Parma, Milano and Padova, but researchers from Leuven, Durham, Liverpool John Moore, Pompeu Fabra Universities and University College of Dublin are contributing, with different expertise, to the attempt of reconstructing the complex history of the region. The Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs also provides a financial support to the project. PI of the project is Donatella Usai assisted by Sandro Salvatori.

Few years of survey in the area have highlighted an unpredicted richness in cultural heritage and archaeological evidence ranging from Palaeolithic till the Christian and Islamic eras. The core of the project, since 2004, is a group of sites located near the village of Al Khiday. These sites produced the first well-preserved stratified and structured evidence of human occupation dating at the Early-Middle Holocene. At one of them, the cemetery, known as Al Khiday 2, two hundred individuals were excavated, pertaining to four different phases: pre-Mesolithic (> ca. 7000 BC), Mesolithic (ca. 7000/6250 BC), Neolithic (4600-4000 BC) and Meroitic (1st century BC/1^st century AD). The pre-Mesolithic burials, accounting to one hundred, are very characteristic for the burial ritual they observe: most individuals, nearly 95%, are buried elongated and prone. This is quite unusual and rarely documented in prehistoric cemeteries, never so systematically.

Furthermore the area of Al Khiday produced archaeological evidence of the Neolithic, Meroitic and Post-Meroitic period but also of the Early Middle Palaeolithic/Middle Stone age. However the most important site of this period is Al Jamrab, located 8 kilometres west of Al Khiday. On-going investigation at al-Jamrab (White Nile region) highlights the archaeological potential of the central Sudan and illustrates the importance of an integrated approach combining archaeological excavation and palaeoenvironmental reconstruction for understanding cultural site formation and post-depositional dynamics. The stratigraphic sequence at al-Jamrab includes a thick cultural layer rich in Early and Middle Stone Age artefacts, preserved in a deeply weathered palaeosol developed on fluvial sediments. The cultural layer includes a two-fold human occupation covering the Middle Stone Age, with Acheulean and Sangoan bifacial artefacts, although an Early Stone Age/Middle Stone Age transitional phase cannot be excluded. The artefact-bearing unit is attributed to the Upper Pleistocene based on preliminary OSL dating, the local palaeoenvironmental context, and strong pedogenetic weathering. Considering the paucity of archaeological data for the Pleistocene of Sudan and the importance of this region in the study of human dispersal out of Africa, this preliminary work on a new site and its associated stratigraphic context provides insights into the early peopling of Sudan and adds one more tessera to the Eastern Africa picture.