Abstract:

Landscapes as well as nomadic pastoralists are difficult to define, ever-changing and on the move. But it is this elusiveness what make them fascinating. Difficult to trace due to their constant seasonal movements in search of foraging areas and water, nomadic pastoralists left few material traces. This characteristic makes these societies a real challenge for archaeologists around the world, and the nomads of the Horn of Africa are no exception. Roamed by pastoralists since at least the third millennium BC, the Northeast Horn (Somalia, Somaliland, Djibouti, eastern Ethiopia and southern Eritrea) today hosts one of the most resilient and rich pastoral populations in the world. For centuries, pastoralists have wandered following wadis, paths, and trade routes, shaping a vast funerary landscape in which Neolithic burial grounds, cairns, mosques and Islamic tombs coexist in a complex palimpsest. In order to understand this Gordian Knot, a highly reliable methodology has been developed and applied over the past five years in field surveys and mapping, using remote sensing and GIS spatial analysis to help us navigate this turbulent and yet fascinating sea of ​​wadis and tombs.

Speaker Bio:

Pablo Gutiérrez de León is a French-Spanish archaeologist who completed his bachelor’s degree in Archaeology in 2018 and his master’s degree in American Anthropology at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) in 2019. He completed his doctoral thesis ‘Archaeology of nomadic pastoralism in the Northeastern Horn of Africa. A long-term perspective’ funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and supervised by Alfredo Ruibal-González in the year 2025. He is currently a permanent member of the Society of Africanist Archaeologists (Safa) and a junior postdoctoral fellow at the American School of Prehistoric Research where he develops his work about nomadic pastoralism and landscape archaeology in the Horn of Africa.