At the heart of the African Acheulean: the physical, social and cognitive landscapes of Kilombe

Kilombe is known as an extensive late Lower Pleistocene Acheulean site complex in the Rift Valley in Kenya. We report here on recent research which has explored a longer stratigraphic succession around the sites, casting light on landscape development and occupation through much of the last million years. With its position near the Equator the site complex is close to the geographic and chronological heart of the Acheulean, and ideally suited to investigations, because of the extent of preservation of ancient landscape, and the potential for dating and recovery of environmental information The new surveys have concentrated on studying the site area in its local setting near the foot of Kilombe volcano, which became extinct in the early Pleistocene, and formerly held a crater lake, currently under investigation. In 2011, bifaces were also found at the mouth of the volcano gorge. Events on the Acheulean main site terminated with a volcanic eruption which deposited the 3-banded tuff (3BT), now dated to ca. 990,000 years, but the sequence continues above this level, and is capped locally by an ashflow tuff (AFT) some 7 metres thick, the product of a landscape-transforming eruption probably deriving from an ancestor of the present day Menengai. To the east and west, the sequence then resumes with major exposures of tuffaceous sediments belonging to the Middle and Upper Pleistocene, and containing Middle Stone Age and Later Stone Age artefacts. These provide the chance to study newer landscapes within the same catchment. The Kilombe main site permits very rare opportunities to compare large numbers of bifaces and other artefacts which are of the same age across a distance of around 200 metres, and so build up a picture of local variability within a site complex. The site area allows comparisons – within the complex to explore its structure of variation, on a regional scale of site catchment, and then externally to help evaluate issues across the greater Acheulean world and through the Middle Stone Age. Although the development of the MSA can be seen only sketchily at present, the preservation of both contexts and artefacts demonstrates the potential to elaborate a longer record