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In southern Ethiopia, the sacred ancestral landscapes, Bayira Deriya, often ignite Boreda elder’s memories about resettlement, drought, conflict, and disease. Likely in the 13th century, Boreda ancestors ascended from the eastern lowlands to find refuge in the Bayira Deriya forested plateaus. These mountaintop landscapes also harbored a commanding view over the Rift Valley, from which many Boreda successfully defended their sovereignty during a series of 15th to 19th-century incursions. By the early 20th century, the confluence of disease and colonization by the Ethiopian state led to the abandonment of mountaintop communities and resettlement in the valleys. Forests bloomed in and around Bayira Deriya’s historic settlements, defensive architecture, and graves. Boreda elders frequently recalled pilgrimages to these sacred forests to propitiate ancestors imbued with the power to relieve grief and anxiety associated with infertility, illness, human peril, and drought. Many Boreda elders today lament that abandoning their ancestral rites and indigenous ritual-technological practices has again turned their land to ash! They blame migration from rural valleys to towns, the persistence of drought (since 2016), locust swarms (circa 2020), and the death of countless elders (Covid-19) on those who have abandoned their ritual practices at Bayira Deriya landscapes. 

Abstract Histories generally portray southern Ethiopians as pagans who lacked kings because they rely on the historical accounts of their northern Abyssinian conquerors, who adopted Christianity in the first century AD. Justified by a call to spread Christianity and suffering the threat of famine and disease to his empire, Abyssinian emperor Menelik II (1889–1913) conquered and colonized southern Omotic-speaking polities, who cultivated a drought-resistant crop, enset (Ensete ventricosum). According to most Ethiopian histories, Boreda were one of the southern Omotic societies, who quickly succumbed to conquest, adopted new agricultural technologies, and paid tribute and corvée labor. Boreda identity and history are entwined with farming enset, a relationship that provided food security, structured their historic settlement landscape, and charted their relationship with technology, each other, and outsiders. The authors argue that everyday practices, such as the farming of enset, are spaces within which Indigenous peoples frame and materialize ontological resilience against colonialism, religious conversion, and persecution. Boreda oral traditions, life histories, and daily practices support their efforts to resist settlers and richly inform the archaeology of their historic places, Bayira Deriya. 

Boreda Indigenous knowledge prescribed that humans respect all entities with whom they co-inhabit, including stone. Humans, stone, and water’s reciprocal relationships prompted their participation in each other becoming fetuses, infants, children, youth, married adults, mature adults, elders, and ancestors. Life was a co-production between humans and non-humans, such that stone and water could inflict harm or bring well-being to humans. Non-human beings, such as flaked stone tools, were evidence of engaging in correct interaction ‘practice’ (time, place, and actor) with other beings – a process of mutual respect and responsibility and one in which there was no end or final “product”. 

We begin the special issue with an Editorial that focuses on the origin of the workshop and our Stone Stories. Each scholar conveyed at the workshop a personal story that epitomized their relationship with stone. Each story is a unique journey demonstrating how we listened and learned from childhood experiences, elders, and Indigenous communities. Our paths demonstrate how scholars can learn to put aside their Western perceptions and reconceive the world through other ontologies. 

The homeland of the Boreda people—the highlands of southern Ethiopia—sits on the western edge of the Rift Valley, which has long been considered the birthplace of humanity. In Boreda oral traditions, caves birthed the first Boreda people and stories of Dinkinesh (Lucy, Australopithecus afarensis) intertwine with accounts of cave dwellings, stone tools, and the making of leather clothing. Caves today are perceived to be one of the three wombs of the earth according to Boreda Indigenous ontology, Etta Woga. Equated with hollows of fig trees and houses, caves are reproductive liminal spaces. Here, Boreda implore ancestors and nature spirits through technological, therapeutic, and ideological rituals to protect, heal, and transform humans. Caves are part of a network of ancestral sacred grounds that include other significant landscape formations such as high peaks, springs, and forests. Together the interaction of rock (caves), earth (mountains), water (springs), and trees (Fig) on sacred ground is held as evidence that all these elements are beings that have the agency to impact human lives. In turn humans have the responsibility to care and nurture these sacred grounds. 

Abstract Multiple lines of genetic and archaeological evidence suggest that there were major demographic changes in the terminal Late Pleistocene epoch and early Holocene epoch of sub-Saharan Africa 1–4 . Inferences about this period are challenging to make because demographic shifts in the past 5,000 years have obscured the structures of more ancient populations 3,5 . Here we present genome-wide ancient DNA data for six individuals from eastern and south-central Africa spanning the past approximately 18,000 years (doubling the time depth of sub-Saharan African ancient DNA), increase the data quality for 15 previously published ancient individuals and analyse these alongside data from 13 other published ancient individuals. The ancestry of the individuals in our study area can be modelled as a geographically structured mixture of three highly divergent source populations, probably reflecting Pleistocene interactions around 80–20 thousand years ago, including deeply diverged eastern and southern African lineages, plus a previously unappreciated ubiquitous distribution of ancestry that occurs in highest proportion today in central African rainforest hunter-gatherers. Once established, this structure remained highly stable, with limited long-range gene flow. These results provide a new line of genetic evidence in support of hypotheses that have emerged from archaeological analyses but remain contested, suggesting increasing regionalization at the end of the Pleistocene epoch.