The Lothagam North Pillar Site, registered as GeJi9, is an archaeological site at Lothagam on the west side of Lake Turkana in Kenya dating to the Pastoral Neolithic and the Holocene. It is a communal cemetery, built between 3000 BCE and 2300 BCE by the region's earliest herders as rainfall in the area decreased and Lake Turkana receded.^[1][2][3] It is thought to be eastern Africa's largest and earliest monumental cemetery.^[4]

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Lothagam North Pillar Site

Location	Turkana County, Kenya

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The burial site study and excavation were led by Elisabeth Hildebrand from 2009 to 2014.^[1] The burial site is flanked by megaliths, stone circles, and cairns, and is believed to hold the remains of hundreds of individuals.^[3] Many of the people buried at Lothagam North were adorned with stone beads, ivory, animal teeth, rings, or other ornaments.^[2]

Between 12,000 and 5,000 years ago, tropical Africa experienced significant climate change resulting in increased humidity and a northward shift of vegetation zones and fauna. This time period is referred to as the African Humid Period, and during the Early and Middle Holocene, North and East Africa had a humid climate with full lakes and diverse water animals.^[5] The first herding economies emerged during this period, with sheep, goats, and cattle spreading rapidly through the Central Sahara and Nile Valley. As aridity increased in the Sahara Desert, specialized forms of pastoralism emerged and populations shifted out of the region.^[6]

The Lothagam North Pillar Site, situated in the Lake Turkana Basin of East Africa, provides extensive evidence of Early and Middle Holocene pastoralism and adaptations. The site shows that people adjusted to various ways of living, including ceramic use and the hunting and gathering of aquatic resources, as well as relying on livestock and herding.^[5]

During the African Humid Period, the Lothagam North Pillar Site displayed a unique and distinctive monumental tradition amongst significant environmental shifts.^[1] The changing climate caused the lake to recede revealing fertile land for herbivores to feed on, and people began to migrate into northwest Kenya, bringing cattle and herding practices.^[4] As people adapted to changes in the environment, they developed new technologies and social networks. However, around 3300 BCE, the African Humid Phase came to an end in the Turkana region, and the lake level dropped again.^[1] Towards the end of the African humid period, when drier conditions began, nomadic peoples of pastoralist hunter-gatherer communities would return to the site to bury their dead.^[3][7]

The construction and use of the site ended at the end of the humid period by 2300 BCE. The site is the oldest of six known pillar sites in the area and was in use for almost five hundred years.^[4] The architectural elements, such as cairns, stone circles, and platforms, indicate that the site was completed. The change in the climate or new diseases resulting in cattle losses may have forced the local inhabitants to move elsewhere.^[3] It is also possible that social changes and other factors played a role in the decrease in communal burial practices, as these customs were not observed in other herding populations in the Lake Turkana region.^[1]

The Lothagam North Pillar site situated in Kenya features two volcanic ridges oriented in a north-south direction and a trough between them containing deposits ranging from the Pliocene to the Holocene era. GeJi9 is located roughly 1 km northwest of early Holocene beach deposits and is separated into eastern and western sections. The western area is a circular platform supported by three pillars, while the eastern portion consists of six cairns and nine stone circles.^[8]

The platform surrounded by boulders on the western side of the Lothagam site covers an area of 700 square meters and contains a mortuary cavity, which is estimated to hold anywhere from 585 to 1,053 individuals.^[1] Recent research published in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology has argued that the cemetery was for all members of this community, not just the leaders.^[6][9] The site yielded 30 excavated burials containing the remains of at least 44 individuals, including both males and females of different ages, and most of them were buried with ornaments.^[6] Data from excavations and ground-penetrating radar (GPR) reveal that the cemetery was a planned and multi-generational project.^[10] The mortuary cavity was built by removing beach sands from a large area down to sandstone bedrock. Each person was buried approximately 3 feet (0.91 m) deep in a smaller cavity. At the bottom of the mortuary cavity, pits with additional burials were carved into soft sandstone bedrock.^[3] The entire platform was then filled with rubble and capped with basalt pebbles, and natural basalt pillars were brought in and placed surrounding the platform’s east side.^[1]

On the eastern side, excavations occurred around one stone circle and one cairn. The largest cairn at Lothagam North, covering 57 square meters, is surrounded by massive sandstone slabs. The stone circle, a 16 square meter ring of sandstone and basalt cobble, covers a small, central bedrock pit containing remains and artifacts of at least three persons of distinct ages. The stone circle’s compact spacing and size are similar to the arrangement of burials and pits within the western platform.^[1]

The occupation of the Lothagam North Pillar Site and surrounding pillar sites in northwest Kenya were brief, and their absence in other areas suggests that they contributed to important social and economic transformation during their time period.^[11] At Lothagam North Pillar Site, a communal cemetery was constructed over a few centuries amidst all of the social and economic tensions of a dynamic landscape. The site may have served as a landmark for mobile people to express unity through shared ritual, promoting trade, information sharing, and strategic planning of livestock movements across multiple areas. The development of the site supports this idea, suggesting that monumentality helped lessen social and economic challenges.^[1]

Ethnographic and ethnohistoric accounts of eastern African herders and hunter-gatherers offer insights into the possible functions of pillar sites. They describe motivations for construction, including ceremonial, cultural, and religious practices that involved the establishment of social statuses and the gathering of mobile populations. Archaeologists can use this knowledge, even if the practices are different from the past, to test hypotheses about the uses of pillar sites.^[11]

The construction of monumental sites and mortuary customs indicate complex social forms that involve cooperative efforts of large groups to create reminders of shared history and cultural values.^[1] The Lothagam North Pillar Site provides insight into the social networks and cooperation of small-scale mobile societies without emerging social hierarchies, and researchers investigating pastoral frontiers in other parts of the world can use this data to consider a broad range of possible explanations for such sites.^[11] Furthermore, the archaeological record can enrich anthropological understanding of the strategies that led to pastoralist success, which can offer solutions to challenges that exist today, such as globalization, climate change, and urban development.^[6]

• Kalokol Pillar Site
• Manemanya Pillar Site
• Jarigole Pillar Site