Alfredo González-Ruibal’s research while affiliated with Spanish National Research Council and other places

This paper presents the results of the research conducted at the site of Fardowsa, a medieval town located in a strategic trade route in Central Somaliland. The excavations and surveys conducted at the site have confirmed the role of Fardowsa as a trading center between the 14th and 16th centuries, and have revealed the existence of privileged households within the site, with differential access to imports and livestock. The combination of data collected in Fardowsa makes this site the best-studied town in Somaliland for this period, and provides key information to help understand the process of emergence, development and abandonment of permanent settlements in this region of the Horn of Africa.

Interest in egalitarianism and egalitarian behavior in complex societies has grown in recent years, spurred by anarchist approaches and collective action theory. Sub-Saharan Africa, however, has seldom figured in the discussions, despite the fact that it has been historically home to a diversity of societies that have either rejected political centralization altogether or put limits to it. The aim of this article is to examine, from an archaeological point of view, the forms of resistance that have restricted—or thwarted—monarchic power in the continent during the last two millennia. For this, I use the concept of traditions of equality. They can be defined as sets of political practices that are materially constituted, shaped by culture and transmitted through collective memory and that generate and structure egalitarian behavior in any given society. They occur across different types of sociopolitical organizations, from undivided societies of hunter-gatherers to strongly hierarchized kingdoms. Here, I will explore six of such traditions as they operate in Sub-Saharan Africa: relocation and isolation, anarchic and heterarchical settlements, adverse sacralization, equalizing technologies, counterinfrastructures, and revolution.

An archaeology of the Pomeranian Crime of 1939’ is a multidisciplinary scientific project that focuses on collecting the material evidence of the Nazi German mass execution committed in the first months of the Second World War in the Gdańsk Pomerania region in Poland. Since 2023, it has excavated mass graves containing material evidence of crimes against humanity.

Unlike their northern counterparts, the kingdoms of southern Ethiopia have received little attention by archaeologists. Their relatively late emergence and absence of literacy may explain this lack of interest. However, they have much to offer to better understand the history not only of the Horn but also of the precolonial African state more generally. In this paper, the polities that developed in the southern Ethiopian highlands during the second millennium AD are briefly described and then one of them is explored in more detail: the kingdom of Anfillo. An archaeological and historical overview of the polity is provided based on two seasons of fieldwork. It is argued that in Anfillo, as in other southern Ethiopian polities, a fortified landscape materialized at the same time a persistent situation of conflict and the collective memory of the ruling classes, which used it as a mnemonic device to tell history and legitimize social divisions.

In this article, I intend to use archaeology’s understanding of deep time and infrastructure to explore the ways in which state-making has been challenged in the Horn of Africa during the last two millennia. I will take a long-term approach to state ecology and state resistance so as to eschew the presentist bias that is all too frequent in political analyses, particularly in Africa, and that prevents us from understanding some of the deep undercurrent that explain contemporary phenomena. The Horn is an ideal case for this kind of inquiry because it has some of the oldest state polities south of the Sahara; state trajectories in the region are non-linear and fraught with obstacles, though surprisingly persistent, and small-scale, stateless societies have proved to be extremely persistent, both in the periphery and at the heart of the state. Here I will explore three themes that are illustrative of the relationship between state-building, infrastructures and resistance in the borderlands of the Horn of Africa: the anti-infrastructural ethos of nomadic pastoralists; internal frontiers or zones of difference, and liminal ecologies, such as swamps and escarpments, which defy state control, technologies and imaginaries.

The 34 articles published in this volume form the proceedings of the 9th Red Sea conference held at Lyon in July 2019, whose core topic was the “spatiality of networks in the Red Sea”, including the western Indian Ocean. In the networked space that the Erythra Thalassa never ceased to be, stable factors such as landscape, climate, and wind patterns have been constantly entangled with more dynamic elements, such as human activity. The contributors to this volume explored how the former were integrated into the countless networks formed by humans in the region, and how these were impacted by spatial constraints over the long course of history.This volume offers a wide range of stimulating contributions. The first articles are devoted to medieval and modern European sources on the Red Sea and its exploration, and to the networks of knowledge dissemination about the region. They are followed by papers relating to the main nodes, the ports and islands of the Red Sea. Several articles are then focusing on the agency of hinterland populations in the networks, and the relationships between the regions bordering the Red Sea and central powers that governed them, often from distant lands. Production and consumption networks are the subject of the next articles, to assess the extent and nature of exchanges and to shed light on the archaeology of circulations. The logistics of exploration, exploitation and trade in the regions bordering the Red Sea are then examined. The last series of papers focuses on regions where archaeological work started only recently: Somaliland, Tigray, and the Horn of Africa. Thanks to all the participants, whether they have exploited new data or re‑examined long-known material, the 9th edition of the “Red Sea Project” gave rise to vibrant debates, showing that the Erythra Thalassa remains an endless source of knowledge.