Sitti: Archaeology of a Social Contract and a Cosmogony of Law

The Hill of the Pact: An Archaeology of Connection

African history, when freed from the colonial gaze and allowed to unfold within its own chronology, reveals the creativity of African peoples in reconciling humans with their environment, community life with the exercise of power, and human rights with obligations toward other beings.

The hill of Sitti, a striking elevation rising from a vast plain between Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Somalia, is a powerful illustration of this African endeavor to create its own history.

It was there, at the summit of this austere and luminous mountain, that nearly five centuries ago the great founding assembly of the Issa Xeer is said to have taken place. This stone outcrop became a place of storytelling, a table of laws — in short, a landscape inhabited by history and memory.

Having actively participated in the process of recognizing the Xeer as part of UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2024, the idea of proposing Sitti as one of Africa’s major cultural heritage sites seemed to me a logical and coherent continuation — a way to anchor this socio-political contract in the regional geography.

I was able to convince my colleague and friend, Professor Augustin F. C. Holl, an internationally renowned archaeologist and co-founder of the think tank AFROSPECTIVES: An Africa Initiative, to conduct an evaluation visit to the site.

The visit took place in February 2025, with the assistance of Djiboutian civil society organizations and local authorities from Somali Regional State of Ethiopia. Professor Holl’s report highlights an archaeological site of exceptional value:

• Pre-Xeer necropolises, with circular architecture punctuated by cardinal niches;

• Pastoral habitat structures—corrals, enclosures, stone circles—testifying to seasonal modes of occupation;

• At the summit, the Xeer deliberation circle, decorated with animal engravings and lineage symbols, situated more than 800 meters above sea level.

This costellation signs  reveals what Holl calls a pastoral territoriality: a land-use system based not on ownership but on mobility, community circulation, and collective resource management. Thus, Sitti is not merely a geographical feature - it is a node of ecological and symbolic networks, a “memory-space” where geology, economy, and spirituality intertwine.

Partial view of the cemetery. Credits : Afrospectives

According to Professor Holl, the circular tombs observed at the mountain’s base recall, through their cosmic symmetry, the Saharan funerary architectures of the Neolithic. Their orientation along the four cardinal points evokes a relationship to totality: death becomes a passage among the four directions of life.

Higher up, the stone enclosures mark the rhythms of transhumance, inscribing in the rock the grammar of a world where movement itself is law. And at the top, the Xeer circle—a space for dialogue and collective decision-making—embodies circularity as a principle of governance: there is no absolute center, only a word that circulates and concludes in consensus.

The engravings found at the summit—animals, signs, clan symbols—are not mere ornaments; they express the presence of the sacred in pastoral daily life. The animal, partner of the nomad, recalls the continuity between the human and the living world; the sign, transmitted across generations, roots identity in the memory of stone.

The ridge also offers a 360-degree panoramic view, making the site an exceptional astronomical and astrological observation post.

This meeting place—where matrimonial alliances and political pacts were forged—is the matrix of a social ecology, a model of governance and justice concerned with balance among humans and between humans and their environment.

For all these reasons, the Sitti site can be seen as a cosmic mountain, an African axis mundi linking the depths of the earth to the vault of the sky.

Sample of engravings in the proximity of the Xeer deliberations circle. Credits : Afrospectives.

The Xeer: A Cosmopolitics of Consensus

The archaeology of this site confirms what I discussed in my book Le Verdict de l’Arbre (1991) and in my recent paper “The Issa Xeer: Learning from the Wisdom of the Tree”, published in the collective work I co-edited with Prof. Holl, "Beyond Mimicry: The Potential of African Indigenous Governance Systems" (2024).  I analyze the political philosophy embodied by the Xeer as a philosophy of connection, a cosmopolitics of the pastoral world.

Justice, in this system, is not an act of punishment but an ecological act of repair and compensation, meant to maintain harmony among humans and between humans and their environment. Transgression is not viewed as an individual crime, but as a rupture of the pact between the living, the dead, and the earth.

Through its various components - penal code, political constitution, social code of conduct - the Xeer reflects a constant concern for mediation and harmony.

Following his evaluation mission, Professor Holl confirmed the site’s exceptional archaeological value and regarded it as a laboratory for a promising archaeology in this part of the Horn of Africa. He recommended launching a comprehensive research project involving scholars and students from the three countries concerned (Djibouti, Ethiopia, Somalia).

This mission would, through systematic mapping of all visible sites around the Sitti ridge, help establish a chronology to firmly anchor in history what transpired around the Sitti hill. The results of this research would form the basis for Sitti’s nomination to the UNESCO World Heritage List, demonstrating the interconnection between the intangible and the tangible, from an African holistic vision of heritage.

But beyond scientific protocols, this research - aimed at rehabilitating African landscape thought - falls within the vision of AFROSPECTIVES: to rethink Africa’s contributions to humanity, to build epistemologies of the South, and to offer a renewed perspective on the relationship between science and endegenous knowledge, between intangible creations and material achievements.

From this perspective, the Sitti site is not merely a relic: it is a mirror of our relationship with the world. It invites us to reread pastoral civilization not as a remnant of a bygone era, but as a form of ecological and socio-political intelligence from which modern humanity could learn a great deal.

Sitti, the mountain of the pact, embodies the meeting between memory and foresight: it is a place where tradition becomes a resource for the future. In this sense, it joins the great sites of African cosmogonies inscribed on the World Heritage List - from Simien in Ethiopia to Kilimanjaro in Kenya, from Fouta Djalon in Guinea to Tsodilo Hills in Botswana - where the mountain is at once a sanctuary of the sacred, a pillar of the sky, and a guardian of speech and cosmogonic knowledge.

Through these mountains, Africa tells its own story - not through nostalgia for the past, but through the imagination of a future faithful to its philosophies of balance.

Toward Another Form of Heritage Recognition

The inscription of the Xeer as intangible heritage is thus only the first step. The Sitti massif - as a site of transhumance for regional peoples, and as the source-space of the Xeer’s cosmopolitics, - calls for tangible heritage recognition: not only as an archaeological site, but also as an ecosystem uniting the wisdom of the ancestors with that of the landscape.

In a continent in search of sovereignty, Sitti would thus stand as part of the broader effort to reappropriate the history of African civilizations and to reassess their contributions to the progress of humanity.

Ali Moussa Iye

Founder Afrospectives | Political anthropologist

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References

Holl, A. 1998a The Dawn of African Pastoralisms: An Introductory Note. In The Dawn of African Pastoralisms , In A.F.C. Holl, Guest-editor The Dawn of African Pastoralism, Special Issue Journal of Anthropological Archaeology  17: 81-96.

Holl, A. 1998 b Livestock Husbandry, Pastoralisms, and Territoriality: The West African Record. In A.F.C. Holl, Guest-editor The Dawn of African Pastoralism, Special Issue Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 17: 143-165.

Holl, A. F. C. 2013 Grass, Water, Salt, Copper, and Others: Pastoralists’ Territorial Strategies in Central Sudan. Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association. 22: 39–53.

Moussa Iye, A. 2019 Le Verdict de l’Arbre: Essai sur unedDémocratie endogène africaine. Réedition, Djibouti, France, Editions Francolin

Moussa Iye, A Le choix de l’Ugaas dans la tradition du Xeer : un processus original pour désigner un roi, 2010, Djibouti

Moussa Iye, A. 2025  The Issa Xeer: Learning from the wisdom of the Tree. In Beyond Mimicry: The Potential of African Endogenous Governance Systems. Edited by A. Moussa-Iye and A. F. C. Holl. Pp. 95-122. Berlin/Boston; De Gruyter.

Paris, F. 1996 Les Sepultures du Sahara Nigerien, du Neolithique a l’Islamisation. Paris, Editions de l’ORSTOM.

Zerfu, F., Mektel, A. and Bogale, B. 2019 Land Use and Land Cover Dynamics in the North-Eastern Somali Rangelands of Eastern Ethiopia. International Journal of Geosciences, 10, 811-832. https://doi.org/10.4236/ijg.2019.109046.