User:小文儿/Lothagam Lokam

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Lothagam Lokam is an archaeological site at Lothagam near the southwestern shore of Lake Turkana in Turkana county near the Kerio river in northwestern Kenya. The site was occupied between approximately 9000 and 6000 years ago, when Lake Turkana was much bigger than it is today. During occupation the site would have been located on a peninsula jutting out into the lake. Lothagam Lokam was one of a number of fishing settlements in the Lake Turkana basin where Nile perch, catfish, turtles, crocodiles, and other aquatic species were hunted.

The site’s archaeological importance was realised by Mr Phillip Angella Immuron who worked as a schoolteacher in the nearby city of Lodwar. He had heard from tribal elders that Lothagam was a place where ancient bones could be found. The first archaeological excavations at the site were led by archaeologist L.H. Robbins in 1965-1966 which uncovered bone points (harpoons), stone artefacts (lithics), animal (fauna) and human skeletal remains. Excavations resumed in 2017 aiming to explore questions of fisher-hunter-gatherer resilience in Eastern Africa during the Holocene.

Etymology
Here I will talk about how the site got its name and the Kenya naming conventions (GeJi11 and stuff). Names: Lothagam Lokam, Lothagam Harpoon site, GeJi11.

Location
Lothagam Lokam is a fisher-hunter-gatherer site at Lothagam near the southwestern shore of Lake Turkana in Turkana county near the Kerio river. It lies 64 kilometres (40 miles) from the city of Lodwar.

Modern ecology
Today, the site is dry and sandy with basaltic ridges on either side of the site.

Palaeoecology
During the early Holocene (11,000 - 8,000 years ago), Lake Turkana was much larger and Lothagam's two basalt ridges would have formed a peninsula jutting out into the lake, forming a narrow beach. At the North end of the site there was a sheltered cove and sometimes a swamp at the South end of the site. Over thousands of years, Lake Turkana grew and shrunk causing the shoreline to move.

Excavations
Something here.

1965-1966 season
The 1965-1966 excavations at Lothagam Lokam produced large ceramic and lithic collections and one of the largest assemblages of Early Holocene human remains from East Africa.

2017 season
The goal of the 2017 excavations were to figure out the chronology and palaeoecology of the site as well as to salvage human remains at risk of destruction via erosion. During these excavations, the archaeologists found stone tools made from basalt, chert, agate, and quartz, as well as some made from obsidian that was brought to the site from further away. They also found the remains of both land and lake animals. Pottery in the excavation units was undecorated, but on the surface there were some sherds decorated with designs associated with the Saharan African Humid Period. Also on the surface were many bone harpoons. I need to write about palaeoecology here. This has been interpreted by the archaeologists to mean that increasingly dry conditions paired with rapidly dropping lake levels posed a challenge to the fisher-hunter-gatherers that used the site, but that they had a certain degree of resilience to these conditions because of exposure to previous, less dramatic, fluctuation in climate. The work at Lothagam Lokam is ongoing and hopes to further explore the strategic flexibility of the site's inhabitants.