Browsing by Author "Sassoon, H."

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    Archaeological remains on Kilimanjaro
    (Fosbrooke, 1974) Fosbrooke, Henry A.; Sassoon, H.
    Any account of Kilimanjaro would be incomplete without reference to the archaeological remains to be found on the foothills of Kilimanjaro. While this area cannot claim to contribute to our knowledge of early man to the same extent as the famed Olduvai Gorge, at least it presents some very tangible evidence of man’s more recent occupation in the days before written history. On the western slopes of the mountain, in the area between Ol Molog and Ngare Nairobi and up to the 7,000 feet contour level, farmers have found many stone bowls and stone rings. The bowls and rings are apparently made from local lava, though no petrological tests have been carried out to corroborate this assumption. Unfortunately, it seems that all the finds have been of single, unrelated objects, and yet no concentration of these artefacts has been discovered such as would indicate a living site or a burial. The stone bowls are similar to the deep bowls (type b) reported by the Leakeys from Njoro river (Leakey and Leakey, 1950). On pp. 16 and 77 of this publication, there are very brief reports of a similar site which was excavated in Ngorongoro crater in 1941 and at which stone bowls of Gumban B type were found. It seems very probable that the bowls from western Kilimanjaro will eventually prove to belong to the same general culture as Ngorongoro. A carbon-14 date has been pub¬lished for the Njoro river site: it is approximately 960 B.C. or 2,900 years ago (Cole, 1954, p. 286) but it is probable that the Gumban B culture is much later than this. Apparently associated with the stone bowls in western Kilimanjaro there are flakes and crude blade tools made from obsidian. On one farm, several large cores of this rock have been found, showing the scars from which flakes have been struck. The Geological Survey are not aware of any outcrops of obsidian on Kilimanjaro, nor in the whole of northern Tanzania. The nearest known outcrop is probably the one in Kenya which is a few miles north-east of Lake Magadi. The nearest major outcrop of obsidian is probably that in the Njorowa Gorge, south of Lake Naivasha. Whichever was the source of the obsidian on Kilimanjaro, it seems that it must have been carried at least 100 miles to the Ngare Nairobi area. Some decorated pottery fragments have been found in the same area as the obsidian artefacts; and one example of a celt or polished stone axe has been found. This latter is of considerable importance on account of the extreme rarity of celts in Tanzania. Yet another feature of this interesting area are the earth dams which extend across certain of the valleys. These dams are sometimes as much as 6 feet high and 150 feet long. At present there is some doubt as to their origin. Some consider them to be man- made, but others think that they have been formed by cattle repeatedly following the same tracks across the valley; the soil and stones, loosened by the hooves of the cattle, wash down laterally and eventually meet to form a natural ridge across the valley bottom. It should be possible to settle this argument by excavation and examination of sections across one of the dams