Place-making, participative archaeologies and Mursi megaliths: some implications for aspects of pre- and proto-history in the Horn of Africa Timothy Clack a * and Marcus Brittain b a School of Archaeology, University of Oxford, 36 Beaumont Street, Oxford OX1 2PG, UK; b Cambridge Archaeological Unit, University of Cambridge, 34a Storey’s Way, Cambridge, CB3 0DT, UK (Received 24 March 2010; final version received 10 July 2010) Here we present the context and nature of findings from the first season of archaeological survey and trial excavation in an area of Ethiopia’s Lower Omo Valley. With the exception of well-documented early hominin discoveries, the region has previously been overlooked as a wilderness absent of human inhabitation. Such an outlook has fostered various consequences for strategies of legal, research and conservation policy within the regional boundaries of Mursiland in particular. In this paper recent discoveries of megalithic circular platforms and other archaeological remains are introduced against their dynamic local and regional placement within present-day understandings of place. Furthermore, we emphasise the value of a participative archaeology research framework in which accountability is directed towards common ground between multiple ‘‘stake-holders’’ within the design and dissemination of the research agenda. This demonstrates important possibilities for intricate understandings of wilderness and landscape linked to heritage, conservation, development and tourism. Keywords: archaeology; landscape; Mursi; participation; stone platform; wilderness Southwestern Ethiopia ‘‘is an area whose Holocene archaeology is essentially unknown’’. 1 ‘‘The later archaeology of southern Ethiopia remains almost completely Unknown.’’ 2 ‘‘Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?’’ 3 In many important respects the archaeology of the Lower Omo Valley of Ethiopia is in its infancy. Nonetheless research is currently underway within the land of the Mursi, whose population of 10,000 forms one of the eight distinct ethnic groups of the Lower Omo. This is directed towards an understanding of changes in the expression of the relationship between landscape and identity in the Lower Omo, notably the pre-Mursi community response to environmental pressures, and the location of archaeological remains in contemporary Mursi oral histories. This article offers a preliminary report on archaeological investigations along the Elma River Valley in Mursiland (Figure 1). The aim is to contextualise the disciplinary and social *Corresponding author. Email: timothy.clack@arch.ox.ac.uk Journal of Eastern African Studies Vol. 5, No. 1, February 2011, 85Á107 ISSN 1753-1055 print/ISSN 1753-1063 online # 2011 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/17531055.2011.544551 http://www.informaworld.com