Call for effective promotion of The Isimila Stone Age Site

Stone tools and artifacts found at Isimila near Iringa town, which is about 500 kilometres from Dar es Salaam, show that the Hehe - one of the ethnic groups in the region - used the site as a sort of Stone Age weapons factory.

“We are grappling to promote this important historical site to lure more tourists, but our efforts are not moving at the speed we expected,” said Siena Mgendi, the officer in-charge of Isimila Stone Age site in Iringa.

The site is currently administered by the Department of Antiquities of the Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism. The site is located 15km from Iringa, off Mbeya road.

He said this when he spoke to a delegation from Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) which was led by Kei Umetsu.

Mgendi described the Isimila Stone Age site as one of the historical and wonderful sites in East Africa whereby the discoveries of stone tools, believed to have had been used by ancient people during early stone age about 300,000 years ago, was discovered in 1951.

He said the number of visitors to the site was not as good as expected and that was why there was need to increase promotion of the country’s exciting tourist destination.

In recent years, the number of tourists visiting the site has been about 25,000 visitors per year, mostly from the United States of America, United Kingdom and Germany.

In the late 1950s, amid a landscape of small canyons and eroded sandstone pillars, archaeologists discovered one of the most significant Stone Age ever identified. Tools found at the site are estimated to be between 60,000 and 100,000 years old.