Ethiopia's 14th-Century Cannabis Pipes, and a Popular Claim That Doesn't Hold Up

In 1971, archaeologist J.C. Dombrowski excavated two ceramic pipe bowls from Lalibela Cave in Ethiopia’s Begemeder Province, near Lake Tana. Years later, chemist Nikolaas van der Merwe subjected residue from the bowls to chromatographic analysis and published the results in 1975: the black resin coating the pipes tested positive for cannabis-derived compounds, and radiocarbon dating placed the pipes at 1320 AD, plus or minus 80 years, putting the find squarely in the 13th to 14th century. It remains, on the current archaeological record, the earliest confirmed evidence of cannabis smoking specifically in Africa.

That finding is genuinely significant on its own terms, evidence of a specific consumption technology, a ceramic pipe built for inhaling burning plant matter, in use in the Ethiopian highlands roughly 700 years ago. But a claim that circulates alongside it, that the discovery shows Africans were “smoking weed 200 years before China recorded marijuana smoking,” reverses the actual chronology by a wide margin. Chemical residue analysis published in Science Advances in 2019 identified cannabis burned in wooden braziers at the Jirzankal Cemetery in China’s Pamir mountains, part of ritual practices dated to roughly 500 BC, some 1,800 years before the Ethiopian pipes were made, not 200 years after. The Chinese evidence involves a different method, cannabis burned in a brazier and its smoke inhaled in an enclosed space, rather than drawn through a pipe, so the two finds aren’t strictly measuring the same practice. But on the specific claim of who documented cannabis use earlier, the Ethiopian find is not first; it is, by the current evidence, roughly a millennium and a half behind.

None of that diminishes what the Lalibela Cave pipes actually demonstrate: a documented, chemically confirmed, radiocarbon-dated practice of cannabis pipe-smoking in 14th-century Ethiopia, discovered through careful archaeological and chemical work rather than assumption, standing on its own as one of the earlier known examples of the specific technology of the smoking pipe anywhere in the archaeological record.