Abstract
Goda Buticha is located some 30 km west of the Dire Dawa city in eastern Ethiopia and is one of the rare stratified archaeological sites in the Horn of Africa that documents Late Pleistocene human occupation from at least c. 63 ka. To date, c. 5 m3 of sediments have been excavated from a surface of 2 m2 at the entrance of the cave. The Goda Buticha sequence is marked by an important chronological gap in the human occupation during the MIS 2 and beginning of Holocene, similarly to other records in the region. Besides abundant lithic artifacts, major archaeological finds at the site include several hundreds of mammalian and small vertebrate remains, hominin remains, and expressions of symbolic behavior in the form of ostrich eggshell beads and engraved fragments. These cultural assemblages of Goda Buticha questions the dynamics of behavioral change and continuity in the frame of the Middle Stone Age/Later Stone Age transition. The deposit of the cave also documents evidence of climate and local environment shifts throughout the sequence.
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Notes
- 1.
Mean+−1 sigma; contrary to what the captions says, the uncertainty for Table 1 of Tribolo et al. (2017) is one sigma.
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Acknowledgments
We thank the Ethiopian Authority for Research and Conservation of Cultural Heritages (ARCCH) of Ethiopia for providing permission to survey in the area, to excavate in Goda Buticha, and to give access for analysis to the collection at the National Museum of Ethiopia. We also thank the Tourism and Culture Offices of the Eastern Harerghe, Western Harerghe, the Dire Dawa Administration, and Harari National Regional State for fieldwork administrative support Local people living near the site have made vital assistance to excavations. We are also very thankful to the other colleagues and students for their work and analyses. The excavation was supported by grants for the South East Ethiopia Cave Survey Project from the National Geographic Society, Wenner-Gren Foundation, and additional fundings and supports from the Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle (UMR CNRS 7194, LabEx ANR-10-LABX-0003-BCDiv) and from the City of Paris (PrehisTropic project, Emergence(s) program). We are grateful to the French Center for Ethiopian Studies for providing logistical support and for funding part of the post-excavation analyses. The editors and reviewers are thanked for their helpful suggestions and invitation to contribute to the handbook.
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Pleurdeau, D. et al. (2023). Goda Buticha, Ethiopia. In: Beyin, A., Wright, D.K., Wilkins, J., Olszewski, D.I. (eds) Handbook of Pleistocene Archaeology of Africa . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20290-2_20
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