Buur Heybe

About

Buur Heybe, which translates to "The Hill of the Potter's Sand", is a late Pleistocene and Holocene archaeological complex located in the largest granite inselberg in the inter-riverine region of the southern Bay province of Somalia approximately 180 km northwest of the capital Mogadishu. Buur Heybe has a longstanding history of archaeological research dating back to the 1930s when Paolo Graziosi carried out the first professional archaeological excavation in Somalia in the rockshelter site of Gogoshiis Qabe in Buur Heybe. Further excavations by J. Desmond Clark in the 1950s and later by the Buur Ecological and Archaeological Project (BEAP) led by Steven Brandt in the 1980s have made Buur Heybe one of the best dated and closely studied archaeological sites in Somalia. Excavations in the Buur Region ended abruptly in 1989 as the encroaching Somali Civil War threatened to engulf southern Somalia, although plans were made by BEAP to return to the Buur Region in 1990, the collapse of the Somali government effectively ended all archaeological research in Southern and Central Somalia to this day. Furthermore, as war consumed Mogadishu the Somali National Museum was looted resulting in the destruction of all BEAP archaeological collections which included soil samples, lithics, and human skeletons from Buur Heybe and Guli Waabayo. Fortunately for archaeologists, the Somali Academy of S

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