‘Lost City’ Used 500 Years of Soil Erosion to Benefit Crop Farming

Carol Lang inspects the terrace site at Engaruka

Credit: University of York

Engaruka first came under the spotlight in 1935 and was thought, at the time, to be a ‘lost city’ of up to 40,000 inhabitants. It has since been recognised as the remains of the largest abandoned system of irrigated agricultural fields and terraces in sub-Saharan Africa.

Engaruka is on the tourist trail, but most well known for its wildlife

Credit: University of York

Covering 20km2, the site was mysteriously abandoned 200 years ago, which some experts believe was due to climate change or deforestation reducing the water supply to the fields.

Dr Carol Lang, from the University of York’s Department of Archaeology, said: “This area of east Africa attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists each year, many visiting the Serengeti National Park and the Ngorongoro Conservation Area to see the wildlife and meet Maasai herders. Very few, however, realise the archaeological importance of the plains below the parks.

“We knew before starting our work that an irrigation system of this size required more water than is available in the area today, but what we have found is that the site used to flood, and that the inhabitants carefully manipulated these floods to grow crops and to accumulate vast quantities of sediments.”

Engaruka is now home to tribes of livestock herders, but the land no longer produces food crop as it once did

Credit: University of York

Using a combination of archaeological excavation, soil micromorphology and geochemical analyses, this research turns on its head the assumption that soil erosion is always a bad thing.

Dr Daryl Stump, Principal Investigator for the project, said: “The inhabitants of ancient Engaruka were clearly highly skilled landscape engineers and agricultural managers, and there are lessons to be learnt here that can be applied to modern farming.

“Since recognising these sediment traps at Engaruka, our team has found very similar structures at the UNESCO World Heritage site of Konso in Ethiopia, where farmers report that sediment traps are more economically important than hillside terraces.”

By presenting this research at international meetings, team members have also helped identify what seem to be very similar structures in South America, the Middle East and India, suggesting that this method of farming was once far more widespread.

The research by the AAREA Project (Archaeology of Agricultural Resilience in Eastern Africa) is funded by European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme Starter Grant Scheme.

Contacts and sources:

Samantha Martin 

University of York

Citation: Geoarchaeological evidence for the construction, irrigation, cultivation, and resilience of 15th–18th century AD terraced landscape at Engaruka, Tanzania
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/qua.2017.54