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Image Credit: Petek-Sargeant, African Archaeological Review (2026)
Review Reframes East Africa’s Turkwel Tradition as a Dynamic Cultural Network
A new archaeological review has reassessed the Turkwel tradition, a first-millennium AD cultural tradition known mainly from grooved pottery found across parts of East Africa. The study brings together available evidence from South Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda to clarify how this tradition developed and how it should be understood within wider regional changes.
The Turkwel tradition was first defined from sites in the Lake Turkana region of Kenya and is generally associated with pastoral, fishing, and foraging communities. Its most recognizable feature is thin-walled pottery decorated with continuous horizontal grooves, although the review cautions against using this pottery style alone as a simple marker for identifying Turkwel sites.
The study shows that Turkwel-related sites were not uniform. While grooved pottery appears across a wide area, local differences are visible in ceramic production, decoration, stone-tool use, settlement location, and subsistence practices. In Turkana, some sites show strong links to fishing and lake resources, while other regions present different patterns, including greater reliance on domestic animals, wild resources, or mixed subsistence strategies.
The review also highlights regional contrasts. Turkana appears as a central area for the tradition, with important sites such as Lopoy, Apeget 1, and Eliye Springs. In Baringo, sites share some Turkwel traits but show differences in pottery manufacture and lithic raw materials. In Karamoja, Uganda, and in areas of South Sudan and southwestern Ethiopia, the evidence is less complete, but it suggests broader interaction zones rather than a single fixed cultural package.
Based mainly on ceramic analysis, the study proposes that Turkwel may be divided into two phases and into northern and southern regional facies. It also argues that Turkwel should be linked more clearly to nearby and related traditions, including the Lokabulo tradition in South Sudan, rather than being treated as an isolated archaeological culture.
The review places Turkwel within a period of major social and technological change in East Africa. During the first millennium AD, the region saw the spread of new pottery traditions, the movement of farming communities, the southward expansion of Nilotic-speaking groups, and the gradual adoption of iron among pastoralist societies.
Rather than presenting Turkwel as a fixed identity, the study suggests that its communities acted as cultural “bricoleurs,” adopting and adapting existing and new practices into local ways of life. This perspective helps explain the high variability of Turkwel material culture and points to changing ways in which identity was expressed through objects, especially ceramics.
Overall, the review provides a broader and more flexible understanding of the Turkwel tradition. It also identifies important gaps in research, particularly in South Sudan and western Ethiopia, where further archaeological work could greatly improve understanding of social change in first-millennium AD East Africa.
Published on: 05-06-2026
Edited by: Abdulmnam Samakie
Source: African Archaeological Review
