List of caves in Kenya

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Entrance to the Mau-Mau cave Entrance to the Mau-Mau Cave in Kenya.jpg
Entrance to the Mau-Mau cave

A cave or cavern is a natural void in the ground, [1] [2] specifically a space large enough for a human to enter. Caves often form by the weathering of rock and often extend deep underground. The word cave can also refer to much smaller openings such as sea caves, rock shelters, and grottos, though strictly speaking a cave is exogene, meaning it is deeper than its opening is wide, [3] and a rock shelter is endogene. [4]

List of caves in Kenya

NameLocationNotes
Kitum Cave Mount Elgon National Park Kitum Cave is located in Mount Elgon National Park, Kenya. In the 1980s, two European visitors contracted Marburg virus there. It is one of five named “elephant caves” of Mount Elgon where animals, including elephants, “mine” the rock for its sodium-rich salts.
Leviathan Cave eastern Kenya Leviathan Cave, also known as the Grotte de Leviathan, [5] is a lava tube in eastern Kenya first discovered in 1975. [6] Although it has been segmented by the movement of tectonic plates, the overall length of the lava tube spans a distance of 11.5 km. [7] It is the longest and deepest known lava tube in Africa. [6] Leviathan Cave is located in the Chyulu Hills National Park at the edge of the Nyiri Desert, which is found northwest of Tsavo West National Park. [7] [8]
Mau-Mau Cave near Nanyuki Located near Nanyuki, about 199.2 km North East of Nairobi [9] in Kenya's Central Province, the Mau Mau Cave was used as a hide-out by Kenyan Freedom Fighters during the Mau Mau Uprising of 1952 to 1960. It is located approximately 18 km south of the equator inside the thick Mount Kenya National Park.
Njoro River Cave Mau Escarpment Njoro River Cave is an archaeological site on the Mau Escarpment, Kenya, that was first excavated in 1938 by Mary Leakey and her husband Louis Leakey. [10] Excavations revealed a mass cremation site created by Elmenteitan pastoralists during the Pastoral Neolithic roughly 3350-3050 BP. [11] Excavations also uncovered pottery, beads, stone bowls, basket work, pestles and flakes. The Leakeys' excavation was one of the earliest to uncover ancient beads and tools in the area and a later investigation in 1950 was the first to use radiocarbon dating in East Africa. [12]
Paradise Lost Caves Kiambu County Paradise Lost Caves are a cave system located in Kiambu County, Kenya. They were discovered officially by Joseph Mbai and some of his farmhands on his property in 1996. A National Museums of Kenya expedition uncovered human remains dated back 8000-12000 years, along with obsidian artifacts from the Later Stone Age. The caves are outfitted with electric lighting for tours that pass through, but can be difficult to traverse due to caves becoming very narrow at points. [13]

Related Research Articles

Njoro River Cave

Njoro River Cave is an archaeological site on the Mau Escarpment, Kenya, that was first excavated in 1938 by Mary Leakey and her husband Louis Leakey. Excavations revealed a mass cremation site created by Elmenteitan pastoralists during the Pastoral Neolithic roughly 3350-3050 BP. Excavations also uncovered pottery, beads, stone bowls, basket work, pestles and flakes. The Leakeys' excavation was one of the earliest to uncover ancient beads and tools in the area and a later investigation in 1950 was the first to use radiocarbon dating in East Africa.

Elmenteitan

The Elmenteitan culture was a prehistoric lithic industry and pottery tradition with a distinct pattern of land use, hunting and pastoralism that appeared and developed on the western plains of Kenya, East Africa during the Pastoral Neolithic c.3300-1200 BP. It was named by archaeologist Louis Leakey after Lake Elmenteita, a soda lake located in the Great Rift Valley, about 120 km (75 mi) northwest of Nairobi.

References

  1. ↑ Whitney, W. D. (1889). "Cave, n.1." def. 1. The Century dictionary: An encyclopedic lexicon of the English language (Vol. 1, p. 871). New York: The Century Co.
  2. ↑ "Cave" Oxford English Dictionary Second Edition on CD-ROM (v. 4.0) © Oxford University Press 2009
  3. ↑ Moratto, Michael J. (2014). California Archaeology. Academic Press. p. 304. ISBN   9781483277356.
  4. ↑ Lowe, J. John; Walker, Michael J. C. (2014). Reconstructing Quaternary Environments. Routledge. pp. 141–42. ISBN   9781317753711.
  5. ↑ "World Cave List". Sop.inria.fr. 15 August 1997. Retrieved 24 November 2011.
  6. 1 2 Forti; Galli; Rossi (July 2004). "Minerogenesis of Volcanic Caves of Kenya". International Journal of Speleology. 32: 3–18. Retrieved 7 Apr 2017.
  7. 1 2 Scheffel, Richard L.; Wernet, Susan J., eds. (1980). Natural Wonders of the World. United States of America: Reader's Digest Association, Inc. p. 217. ISBN   0-89577-087-3.
  8. ↑ Tom Parkinson; Matt Phillips; Will Gourlay (2006). Kenya. Lonely Planet. pp. 140–. ISBN   978-1-74059-743-2 . Retrieved 30 July 2012.
  9. ↑ Google Maps
  10. ↑ Leakey, Mary Douglas; Leakey, Louis Seymour Bazett (1950). Excavations at the Njoro River Cave: stone age cremated burials in Kenya Colony. Clarendon Press.
  11. ↑ Lane, Paul J. (2013-07-04). The Archaeology of Pastoralism and Stock-Keeping in East Africa. The Oxford Handbook of African Archaeology. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199569885.001.0001. ISBN   9780199569885.
  12. ↑ Robertshaw, Peter (1988-06-01). "The elmenteitan: An early food‐producing culture in East Africa". World Archaeology. 20 (1): 57–69. doi:10.1080/00438243.1988.9980056. ISSN   0043-8243.
  13. ↑ http://www.showcaves.com/english/misc/index.html Archived 2017-04-01 at the Wayback Machine ShowCaves
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