Tens of thousands of tumuli dot the the landscape of the Afar region of Ethiopia. These tumuli or cairns, are stone burial mounds, referred to as “wadils”. They are huddled together in stone villages of the dead, known as “qabri”. Fallen warriors would have larger and taller mounds, which featured rows of stones indicating the number of kills the warrior had racked up in his lifetime, with some of the graves having dozens such stones.
Some of these graves are quite recent, while others are a lot older. Some may even date back to the Late Stone Age, when a vast neolithic stone landscape stretched across the region during the last African humid period. Little is known about these sites as archaeological excavations in the region have been scant.
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