Rising as high as 20 feet, ancient stone monoliths in southern Ethiopia are 1,000 years older than scientists previously thought, according to a new study in the Journal of African Archaeology.
A Washington State University research team used advanced radiocarbon dating to determine the often phallic-shaped monoliths, or stelae, at the Sakaro Sodo archeological site in Ethiopia's Gedeo zone were likely created sometime during the first century A.D.
The only other attempt to determine the age of the more than 10,000 stele monoliths located at various sites in the Gedeo zone was conducted by French scientists in the 1990s. It provided a far more modest construction date of around 1100 A.D. for the monuments of Tuto Fela in the northern part of Gedeo.
Ashenafi G. Zena, Andrew I. Duff, Addisalem Melesse, John A. Wolff, Alemseged Beldados, M. Steven Shackley. New Dates for Megalithic Stele Monuments of Gedeo, South Ethiopia. Journal of African Archaeology, 2021; 1 DOI: 10.1163/21915784-bja10006
This paper reports the results of an archaeological survey and test excavation conducted in one of the ancient megalithic stele sites in south Ethiopia, Sakaro Sodo. The Sakaro Sodo stele site is situated in Gedeo zone, which is known to have the largest number and highest concentration of megalithic stele monuments in Africa, with an estimate of more than 10,000 stelae in sixty or more sites. Prior to our work, only one absolute date was available (850 ± 40 BP) (Joussaume 2012) from a stele site in the Gedeo zone, suggesting stele sites began to be constructed in the region approximately a millennium ago. We report here new AMS dates suggesting that stelae were being emplaced about 2000 BP, pushing the creation of these monuments back at least a millennium. Additionally, we report preliminary findings from characterizing the geochemical properties of obsidian artifacts recovered from stele sites, and stone used to make stelae. While compositional analysis of obsidian suggests long-distance movement of material from sources located in northern Kenya, petrographic microscopy and electron microprobe analyses show a strong connection of stelae to local geological tuff exposures/sources.
