Talk:Lalibela Cave
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Lalibela Cave covers Lalibela Cave near Lake Tana for the two water-pipe bowls found there: their context and date, the chemical tests on their residues and the conclusions drawn from them.
Data verification
Record source conflicts, dating problems and sources not used here. Keep narrative content on the article.
Discussion
Sources
- van der Merwe (1975), in Rubin (ed.), Cannabis and Culture, pp. 77–80: the bowls, their context and radiocarbon date, the three thin-layer chromatography tests and the conclusions.
- van der Merwe (2005), Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa 60: the author's later paper on the antiquity of smoking in Africa. Its abstract puts the Ethiopian bowls at "ca. A.D. 1400".
- Dombrowski (1971), a Boston University doctoral thesis, is the excavation report on Lalibela and Natchabiet caves.
Dates
- The radiocarbon date, 1320 ± 80 CE (Y-2433), is "associated" with level 2; the 1975 chapter does not say what material was dated. The range 1240–1400 CE is that date plus or minus its error. The chapter's title gives "13th–14th century"; the 2005 abstract rounds to about 1400.
Points to note
- What the tests found. The tests did not find THC, cannabinol or cannabidiol in the Ethiopian residues. The identification rests on two faint, unidentified spots (Rf 0.69 and 0.84) that also appeared in modern pipes known to have been used for cannabis, twice for pipe B2 and once for A2. Some later popular accounts say that cannabidiol and cannabinol were detected in the pipes; the 1975 chapter says the opposite.
- Name. The cave is near Lake Tana in Begemeder. It is not the town of Lalibela or its rock-cut churches.
Georeferencing
No point is given. The cave lies near Lake Tana in Begemeder, but none of the sources prints a position for it, and no gazetteer holds it: Wikidata, OpenStreetMap and Pleiades give points only for the town of Lalibela, which is a different place. Éloise 23:06, 29 October 2026 (+07)