{"it":{"id":"AFR-008","kind":"site","sub":"Africa outside Egypt","name":"Thimlich Ohinga","place":"Kenya","lat":-0.891,"lon":34.325,"mat":"basalt","nfacts":3,"tags":["Africa"],"sum":"Thimlich Ohinga's stone walls in Kenya are 1 to 3 m thick and up to 4.2 m high, with no mortar holding them together.","why":"Tall dry-stone enclosures in Kenya built without mortar by herding communities, whose purpose was both defence and identity.","src":[396],"nsrc":2,"yt":"The walls rise up to 4.5 m. Who were they protecting against?","rel":["AFR-003"],"hook":"Kenya's Thimlich Ohinga walls stand up to 4.5 m high, built without mortar. Who were they meant to keep out?"},"S":{"396":["Wikipedia: Thimlich Ohinga","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thimlich_Ohinga"]},"rec":{"id":"AFR-008","alias":[],"ms":[{"f":"Thimlich Ohinga is located","a":"distance (not a site dimension)","v":"181","u":"km","o":"Thimlich Ohinga is located 181 km south of Kisumu in Migori county, on a gentle sloping hill 46 km north-west of Migori town near Macalder's Mines.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thimlich_Ohinga&oldid=1365210933","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1365210933 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0602"},{"f":"in Migori county on a gentle sloping hill","a":"distance (not a site dimension)","v":"46","u":"km","o":"Thimlich Ohinga is located 181 km south of Kisumu in Migori county, on a gentle sloping hill 46 km north-west of Migori town near Macalder's Mines.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thimlich_Ohinga&oldid=1365210933","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1365210933 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0603"},{"f":"The walls at Thimlich Ohinga are free standing","a":"thickness","v":"1","u":"m","o":"The walls at Thimlich Ohinga are free standing, 1 m thick with no dug foundation.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thimlich_Ohinga&oldid=1365210933","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1365210933 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0604"}],"lab":[{"k":"Materials","mat":"site material (as stated in article)","m":"documentary mention (Wikipedia, auto-extracted)","v":"One striking difference between the two is unlike Great Zimbabwe, Thimlich Ohinga was constructed using unshaped and random loose stones made from local basalt.","by":"no inline ref in article","b":"S","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thimlich_Ohinga&oldid=1365210933"}],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"sub":[],"site":{"age":"","dm":"[see dating_excerpt; method not extracted]","lab":"NO: inference only (style/context/king list/textual)","weak":"no direct lab result on the structure in our records; date from stylistic, contextual or textual inference","unesco":"https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1450","dens":"CENSUS"},"co":{"lat":"-0.891101","lon":"34.325173","src":"Wikidata P625 + UNESCO WHC list XML (agree ≤0.05°)","agree":"agree","b":"V","note":"two independent sources agree; max delta 0.0005 deg (~0.05 km)","osm":"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/422242237"},"src":[{"id":"S0395","t":"no inline ref in article","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thimlich_Ohinga&oldid=1365210933"},{"id":"S0617","t":"Wikipedia: Thimlich Ohinga","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thimlich_Ohinga"},{"id":"VAFR-008-3","t":"Thimlich Ohinga Archaeological Site - UNESCO World Heritage Centre","u":"https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1450/"},{"id":null,"t":"ICOMOS, Evaluation of Thimlich Ohinga Archaeological Site (Kenya), No 1450 Rev, approved 14 March 2018.","u":"https://whc.unesco.org/document/168681"}],"sum":"In the hills of south-western Kenya, 46 kilometres north-west of the town of Migori, the bush is thick enough that you could walk past the walls without knowing they were there. The place has a name that sounds like a warning. In the local Luo language, thimlich means a scary jungle, a dense and frightening thicket. Push through it and the green parts to reveal grey stone: walls of loose, unshaped rock rising higher than a man's head, curving around a hillside near Lake Victoria. No mortar holds them. They have been standing for about five hundred years.\n\nThe second half of the name, ohinga, means a settlement or enclosure built of earth or stone; the plural is ohingni. Thimlich Ohinga is the largest and best preserved of a whole tradition of stone enclosures built by the herding communities of the Lake Victoria Basin from the sixteenth to the middle of the twentieth century. UNESCO, which added it to the World Heritage List, calls it an exceptional witness to how people settled, kept cattle and worked crafts in this region.\n\nThe site has four large enclosures, each with extensions. The main one is called Kochieng. The others are Kakuku, Koketch and Koluoch. Kochieng's outer wall runs about 140 metres from north to south, the length of a city block, and is pierced by three gateways, one on the west and two on the east. They are built as low passage-type doors, the kind you have to stoop to enter. The whole protected property covers 21 hectares, inside a buffer zone of 33 more.\n\nThe walls are free-standing, built from stones of every size, and average about a metre thick. How tall they are depends on whom you ask. The official UNESCO statement gives heights from 1.5 to 4.5 metres. ICOMOS, the expert body that assessed the site for UNESCO, describes Kochieng's walls as 2.5 to 4.2 metres high. Either way, at their tallest they rise well above the height of a basketball hoop, built entirely of stone held in place by nothing but its own weight and the skill of the people who stacked it.\n\nThat skill was considerable. The builders used a three-part design: an outer face and an inner face built up separately, with a fill of stone packed between them to bind the two together. Because the stones are irregular, each was fitted against its neighbours in an interlocking system that keeps the wall stable without mortar or cement. ICOMOS calls this a rather sophisticated technique and credits it for the good condition of the walls after centuries of rain and weather.\n\nInside, the enclosures were a working world. There were homes and house pits. There were cattle pens, called kraals, with low vents at the base of the walls to drain water and sludge away. Passageways were lined with low walls, and buttresses braced the main walls against collapse. Just outside the north wall of the main enclosure lay an industrial area where iron was smelted and worked. It held smooth stones that may have served as anvils, scattered pieces of tuyere, the clay nozzles that feed air into a furnace, and a mound of iron slag, refuse and broken pottery.\n\nSo who built it? The obvious answer turns out to be incomplete. Today the area is home mostly to Luo people, who speak Dholuo, a Western Nilotic language, and the Luo attach deep significance to the site, so it has often been called a historic Luo place. But the evidence tells a more mixed story. Oral tradition says the earliest inhabitants were Bantu-speaking groups, including the Wagire and the Kamageta, and that Nilotic groups such as the Kabuoch-Kachieng, Kadem, Kaler, Kanyamwa and Karungu passed through later. The excavated pottery is mostly cord-rouletted, a style of decoration that is principally Nilotic, while the iron working is associated with Bantu groups. The site seems to preserve the moment two worlds met.\n\nUNESCO therefore describes successive occupation by peoples of different linguistic origins, who settled, moved on and returned, until the site was finally abandoned in the early twentieth century. The mainstream reading of the walls follows from that. They seem to have served as forts for people and their livestock, and they also marked social groups and ties of family lineage. A wall like this did two jobs at once. It kept danger out, and it told everyone who belonged inside.\n\nThat is the part worth dwelling on. Herding peoples move. Their wealth walks on four legs. Yet here, a moving people invested enormous labour in something that could never move: stone walls four metres high, built to stand for generations. That is a choice about security, but it is also a choice about permanence and identity, a way of fixing a claim to land in stone. Whoever was coming through the scary jungle, the builders meant to meet them behind something that would not fall.\n\nWhat they feared is the first open question. The builders left no written record, and nothing in the sources names the threat. The second is how old the site really is. Both UNESCO and ICOMOS place its founding in the sixteenth century, about five hundred years ago, but both use the word probably, and neither gives a precise date.\n\nThe third question is subtler and concerns the walls themselves. Kenya gazetted the site as a national monument on 25 September 1981 and confirmed it on 27 May 1982, and the National Museums of Kenya manage it today. Local elders still help protect it, and the plants and animals around it, through traditional rules and taboos. But the ruins have been heavily restored in recent decades, and UNESCO notes that new work is not always easy to tell from the old stone. ICOMOS accepted that the repairs used traditional methods under supervision, but warned that some may have been done overzealously. The exact original height and shape of some walls is therefore an open question too.\n\nWhen Kenya first proposed the site, it compared Thimlich Ohinga with Great Zimbabwe, with the Western Stone Forts of Ireland and with the walls of Chinese cities, fortified places built of stone across the world. The comparison is a reminder that people who never met, on different continents, kept arriving at the same answer to danger: pile up the earth's bones, fit them close, and hold your ground.\n\nThe walls still stand in their thicket, grey against the green, five centuries after herders and ironworkers who may not have shared a language raised them. What does it take for people who are always moving to build something meant to last forever, and what were they so determined to keep out?","qs":["The walls rise up to 4.5 m. Who were they protecting against?","The enclosures also marked family lineage. Can a wall be a statement as well as a defence?","Walls were built without mortar. How do dry-stone walls stay standing?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cf/Thimlich_Ohinga_Cultural_Landscape-_Kenya.JPG/1280px-Thimlich_Ohinga_Cultural_Landscape-_Kenya.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thimlich_Ohinga_Cultural_Landscape-_Kenya.JPG","title":"Thimlich Ohinga Cultural Landscape- Kenya.JPG","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"Wycondi","cap":"Thimlich Ohinga Cultural Lanscape is situated in Migori County in Kenya. It is a dry stone walling enclosure that reaches four metres high in some sections and ","alt":"Thimlich Ohinga Cultural Lanscape is situated in Migori County in Kenya. It is a dry stone walling enclosure that reaches four metres high in some sections and"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"138","u":"sites","h":"With 521 stone structures near Lake Victoria; this is the largest","s":[135]},{"v":"Basalt","h":"Made of","s":[135]}],"hs":{"135":["Wikipedia: Thimlich Ohinga (and sources cited there)","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thimlich_Ohinga"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/AFR-008.webp","w":1280,"h":960,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cf/Thimlich_Ohinga_Cultural_Landscape-_Kenya.JPG/1280px-Thimlich_Ohinga_Cultural_Landscape-_Kenya.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}