The Shay Culture of Ethiopia (Tenth to Fourteenth Century ad): “Pagans” in the Time of Christians and Muslims

Bilet and the wider world: new insights into the archaeology of Islam in Tigray

“…Breaking vessels during mourning, however, might have been a distinctively local practice. The deposition of ceramics around and within graves was also observed for the contemporaneous, albeit ‘pagan’, Shay Culture, in the central Ethiopian Highlands, although the ceramics there were initially left intact (Fauvelle & Poissonnier 2016).

Figure 9.Pottery deposits in the Bilet cemetery (figure by S. Dorso & D. Ollivier).

…”

Material cosmopolitanism: the entrepot of Harlaa as an Islamic gateway to eastern Ethiopia

“…Glass beads, including blue glass, are extensively found in medieval non-Muslim contexts in eastern, southern and central Ethiopia, such as at Koticha Kesi, which was abandoned c . 1550, eighth- to twelfth-century Nora, Raré and Sourré-Kabanawa, and ninth- to fourteenth-century Meshalä Maryam and Tätär Gur (Joussaume 1980, 2014; Fauvelle-Aymar & Poissonnier 2012, 2016; Kinahan 2013; Fauvelle-Aymar et al . 2017).…”

The archaeology of complexity and cosmopolitanism in medieval Ethiopia: an introduction

“…Diverse burial monuments, some again containing imported materials and artefacts, have also been found in the area of the Shay Culture of Shoa and in south-east Wallo, at sites such as Tätär Gur (Figure 1). These include tumuli, chamber tombs and dolmen graves dated to between the tenth and fourteenth centuries, when Islam and Christianity were both well established elsewhere in Ethiopia (Fauvelle & Poissonnier 2016).…”