1.1.2. Laga-oda

    Laga-oda is located about 35 km to the southwest of Dire Dawa. Laga-oda is a cave shelter that has remarkably kept the rock paintings numbering over 600 intact for thousands and thousands of years. The paintings in this prehistoric cave shelter consist of pictures of domestic animals, human figures, symbols, and wild animals. Like Porc Epic, this cave shelter has also yielded a number of prehistoric artifacts and faunal remains that belonged to the Later Stone Age.  

Scholars like Cervicek 1971, Clark 1984, and Brandt 1986, date the paintings at both these sites to around 5000bp, but there are others who date them even much earlier. On the other hand, the analysis of the various artifacts discovered by excavations from these two sites date them to be from 77000bp to around 15000bp. This indicates that the Dire Dawa environ had been inhabited since the Middle Stone Age.

1.1.3. Goda-ajewa

This is also a prehistoric cave art site located about 28 km to the southeast of Dire Dawa. Paintings of domestic animals and human figures in black, white and red colors are found in this cave.

1.1.4. Enkuftu Cave

This is a surface cave found at a place called Addis Ketema within Dire Dawa itself. It is a cave about which little is known apart from the fact that one of its walls feels cold, while its opposite one feels very hot when touched. All the same, people, who have lived in the area all their lives, say that there are colorful paintings deep in this cave, and that there are tunnels that go very far. All this will have to be substantiated by archeologists in the years to come.

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