Friday, April 24, 2020
(M. Mackiewicz, CAS UW)
WARSAW, POLAND—Science in Poland reports that researchers led by Michela Gaudiello of the University of Warsaw investigated the site of a medieval Christian church on a hilltop in northeastern Ethiopia. The church was located in the town of Debre Gergis, a stop on the route to the ancient capital of Axum. Gaudiello and her team found stone pillars, wooden foundation pieces, stone blocks from the floor of the church’s semicircular apse, and an inscription written in Ethiopic. Pottery from the site suggests the church dates to between A.D. 700 and 1100. The researchers also used a drone to help complete a survey of the site. To read about a fourth-century A.D. Christian basilica recently discovered at an Aksumite site in Ethiopia, go to “Early Adopters.”
Early Adopters
By MARLEY BROWN
March/April 2020
(Courtesy Michael Harrower)
Basilica, Beta Samati, Ethiopia The remains of a Christian basilica dating to the fourth century A.D. have been discovered at the site of Beta Samati, which may once have been an important religious and commercial center of the Aksum Empire in northern Ethiopia. The Aksumites, who embraced Christianity around A.D. 325, were important Red Sea trading partners with the Byzantine Empire until the Aksum Empire collapsed in the ninth century. Archaeologists discovered a number of artifacts, including stamp seals, coins, possible trading tokens, incense burners, and a stone pendant in the shape of a cross, that suggest the site was used for both administrative and religious purposes. “The basilica seems to have arrived in Ethiopia as a Christian architectural form,” says archaeologist Michael Harrower of Johns Hopkins University, “but it may also have retained some associations with bureaucratic functions that it had in Rome.” Bovine figurines and a gold and carnelian ring engraved with a bull’s head were also uncovered at the site, suggesting that indigenous pagan beliefs survived alongside Christianity. “People are worshipping multiple gods and switching back and forth,” Harrower says. “There appears to have been a lot of flux here in terms of religious tradition.” 
(Courtesy Michael Harrower)
Clockwise from left: 7th-century Aksumite coin (obverse and reverse), stone pendant, gold and carnelian ring