1.2. Siyaara
The site of Siyaara is a coastal fair located around 30 km east of Berbera. It covers circa eight hectares, most of them in a sandy plain next to the beach. At present the only stone buildings that can be glimpsed are a fort with rubble walls and two structures in coral masonry. There are also several Muslim cemeteries with thousands of tombs. Siyaara is mentioned as a port of trade in passing by Ibn Majid, an Arab sailor from the second half of the fifteenth century (Tibbets, 1971: 166, 240): he says that the sailing seasons for Siyaara and Zeila are different. Siyaara is also related to the history of Islamization of Somaliland. According to local lore gathered by Richard Burton (1910: 80), the place was ruled in 1266 by a pagan chief, a magician, which was routed by two holymen from Arabia, Sayyid Yusuf el-Baghdadi and Mohamed bin Yunis el Siddiki. This might be an allegory for the arrival of Muslim missionaries to the region around those dates and its conflict with local pagan communities. Despite its absence in traveler accounts before the nineteenth century (Kirkman, 1975), archaeological remains show that the place was an important commercial hub during the first half of the second millennium CE. This is, in fact, the site that has yielded the highest amount of imported materials so far—our sample includes 525 items—and the one that has a longer chronology, probably spanning from the eleventh to the early nineteenth century.
We surveyed Siyaara on two occasions, in 2017 and 2020. During our second visit, we made a topographic map using a drone and confirmed the spatial patterning and distribution of finds identified during the first field season (Fig. 7). Materials appear in denser concentrations in certain zones, that we named South Beach, Tumulus, Central, East and North. Each of these zones was sampled for artifacts. The one that yielded the greatest amount of finds is Central, which comprises the stone buildings and is flanked by sand mounds, filled with pottery sherds, glass, bones and charcoal, and that extends into the beach. In fact, the area closer to the sea is the one that yielded the highest number of artifacts. The lowest density of finds appears in the North scatter, between the northernmost stone building and the fort. The East zone is dominated by a large mound that seems to be concealing a stone building, whereas South Beach is a small scatter of mostly late materials. Tumulus refers to an area around a funerary cairn, around which appeared several sand mounds with charcoal, ashes, bone, ceramics and glass, perhaps associated with feasting or at least collective consumption as in Bandar Abbas. While most of the categories of artifacts appear in each and every zone, percentages vary from some areas to others. Thus, in Tumulus 76% of the datable materials was pre-1400, whereas the percentage is between 17 and 29% in the other zones. Pre-1400 material also dominates the sand mounds numbered 3, 4, 5, and 6 in the map. It is quite likely that other artifact scatters were sealed by the cemeteries and are today invisible. In general, there seems to be a displacement from south to north between the early and middle second millennium CE.
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