Lake Eyasi

Lake Eyasi lies in northern Tanzania's Rift landscape, beside country long occupied by hunting, gathering, herding and farming communities. Archaeological research in its basin reveals interactions between foragers and food producers extending back roughly three millennia. The lake therefore belongs to a much longer history of contact than the nineteenth-century accounts through which it entered European geographical writing.

The Hadza are closely associated with the country around Eyasi. Their subsistence has drawn on wild animals, honey, fruits and edible plants, with camps moving as resources and circumstances changed. The basin also became a meeting ground for speakers of different languages and practitioners of different livelihoods. A precise political narrative for its shores in the years 1337–1837 remains difficult to reconstruct from surviving written records. Its historical character is more securely approached through the archaeological evidence for coexistence and exchange, alongside the enduring Hadza relationship with the surrounding landscape, than through a succession of named rulers or towns.