Urban precursors in the Horn: Early 1st-millennium BC communities in Eritrea

Out of the combined training and research programmes conducted by the University of Asmara have come several major discoveries that change the way that the rise of urbanism is seen in the Horn of Africa. We highlight research showing that between 800 BC and 400 BC the greater Asmara area of Eritrea supported the earliest settled agropastoralist communities known in the highlands of the Horn. These communities pre-date and are contemporaneous with Pre-Aksumite settlements in the highlands of southern Eritrea and northern Ethiopia.1 The agropastoralist settlements around Asmara were vital precursors to later 1st- millennium BC and early 1st-millennium AD urban developments in the southern highlands of Eritrea at Keskese, Matara and Qohaito. Matara, 90 km to the south of Asmara, was an urban centre of between 20 and 40 ha, possibly even larger. It was likely an Aksumite administrative centre that also had a significant Pre-Axumite settlement that has been dated to approximately 500 BC by the French archaeologist Francis Anfray (1967; 1974), suggesting that the communities around today's Asmara were the first in the region to show an organic growth toward demographic complexity. An other urban center, Qohaito, located approximately 70 km south of Asmara, was an ancient garden city (Schmidt and Wright 1995) surrounded by hundreds of satellite towns, villages and homesteads located on the 13x3 km Qohaito plateau (Wenig 1997) and connected to a larger urban hinterland (Curtis and Libsekal 1999). Qohaito remains unexcavated, but survey evidence indicates that its urban character derives from a tradition that goes back to Matara and the communities of the Greater Asmara area. We also discuss evidence that suggests the possible presence of humped cattle (Bos indicus) in the greater Asmara area about 500 BC, revising previous ideas about the arrival of this species in the Horn and assessing what importance it has for the development of a settled agropastoral way of life.