Lithic Evidence for the Peopling of Northern Ethiopia

A comparative study of lithic assemblages from the Gash Delta lowlands of eastern Sudan and from Seglamen in the highlands of northern Ethiopia is used to investigate the origins of the pre-Aksumite people and their anonymous predecessors. Multiple similarities in knapping strategies and in lithic tool types support the hypothesis of a south-eastward movement of agro-pastoralists into the highlands of the Tigray Plateau, probably starting in the fifth millennium BC.     

Parchment Production in the First Millennium BC at Seglamen, Northern Ethiopia

Traditional Ethiopian and European processes of parchment manufacture and their associated tools are described and compared with artefacts recovered from an important pre-Aksumite site at Seglamen, in the highlands of northern Ethiopia. Many close similarities of tools used at Seglamen in both the earlier and later phases of the pre-Aksumite, from about 800 BC, to implements used by present-day Ethiopian scribes attest to the systematic production of parchment at Seglamen and to cultural continuity over a period of almost three millennia.     

An Ainu approach to symbolic structures and healing techniques

Emiko Ohnuki‐Tierney. Illness and Healing Among the Sakhalin Ainu: a Symbolic Interpretation. Cambridge University Press, 1981. 245pp. $37.50.