Kilombe Volcano, Kenya

Kilombe is an extinct volcano lying on the western flank of the Rift Valley in Kenya, immediately south of the Equator. Over the period it has been subject to research, it has yielded a remarkably long sequence of archaeological sites with different typo-technological characteristics, including Early Stone Age (ESA: Oldowan and Acheulean), Middle Stone Age (MSA), and traces of the Later Stone Age (LSA), contained within a sedimentary record extending through almost the whole of the Pleistocene. It is best known for the Acheulean occupation of the extensive Kilombe Main Site, GqJh1 (Gowlett, J. A. J., Brink, J. S., Herries, A. I. R., Hoare, S., Onjala, I., & Rucina, S. M. (2015). At the heart of the African Acheulean: The physical, social and cognitive landscapes of Kilombe. In F. Coward, R. Hosfield, & F. Wenban-Smith (Eds.), Settlement, society and cognition in human evolution: Landscapes in mind (pp. 75–93). Cambridge University Press.), which is approximately one million years old (Ma), but a renewed program of research has revealed a new sequence of Oldowan and early Acheulean sites in Kilombe Caldera, as well as early MSA sites on the mountain flank (Hoare, S., Brink, J. S., Herries, A. I. R., Mark, D. F., Morgan, L. E., Onjala, I., et al. (2021). Geochronology of a long Pleistocene sequence at Kilombe volcano, Kenya: From the Oldowan to Middle Stone Age. Journal of Archaeological Science, 125, 105273. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2020.105273; Gowlett, J. A. J., Stanistreet, I. G., Albert, R. M., Blackbird, S. J., Herries, A. I. R., Hoare, S., et al. (2022). New Oldowan localities at high level within Kilombe Caldera, Kenya. L’Anthropologie, 126, 102976. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anthro.2021.102976).