Dr Sada Mire was chosen by Hay Festival in 2017 as one of their Hay 30 international thinkers and writers. Onstage at the Festival she talked to Rageh Omaar and Mary Harper (who was the Africa Editor at the BBC World Service) on Somaliland: the African miracle you've never heard about. Also in 2017, New Scientist magazine chose her as one of their list of Inspiring Women in Science.
Dr Mire is the only working Somali archaeologist, and she is described in the programme notes as Swedish-Somali, as she was an asylum seeker who ended up in Sweden after fleeing Somalia with her twin sister Sohur as unaccompanied child refugees. Sohur went on to become a medical doctor. Their father was a police criminal investigator who was murdered when they were twelve.
She is an art historian as well as an archaeologist, and she is a visiting professor in the department of archaeology at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. She also holds a PhD from UCL's Institute of Archaeology, London.
In 2007 she led a team of fifty people to Somaliland, where they discovered prehistoric rock art at almost one hundred locations. At least ten of these are likely to receive World Heritage status, according to her Wikipedia entry.
As a result of her work on the rock art, she founded the Horn Heritage, a non-profit organisation to fund her work. She was also involved with the establishment of Somalia's Department of Tourism and Archaeology. She is also active in campaigns to protect Somali archaeological sites from looting and destruction.
Her latest book came out this year, and is called Divine Fertility: the continuity in transformation of an Ideology of Sacred Kinship in North-East Africa.
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