Two thousand years of West African history

18 Two Thousand Years of West African History Scott MacEachern West African societies have repeatedly been transformed over the last two millennia in response to their own internal dynamics and their changing physical and cultural environments. In this, they resemble societies all over the world: two thousand years is a long time. However, the images of West African history held by many have not reflected that dynamism. Archaeologists and historians in western Europe and North America have often interpreted Africa’s past through simplifying models, privileging continuity and timelessness over inventiveness and adaptation to changing environments, and obscuring the complexity and diversity of African social, political, and ideological experience (Chapters 1, 2). In keeping with the evolutionary preoccupations of earlier scholars, West African history was conceived as a particular instance of the unilinear evolution of human cultures across the globe (Chapters 1, 8–10, 13). As a result, scholars envisioned West African societies in the later first millennium A.D. beginning a crucial evolutionary advance from non-state to state forms of sociopolitical organization under diffusionary influence from outside the continent. This transformed the political environment of the subcontinent, now conceived of in terms of political relations between states and (asymmetrically) between states and non-states. This transformation of West Africa into a region of states was not, however, completed at the time of the last progressive transition in its history. This occurred when European contact woke a “precolonial” subcontinent to outside influences, the slave trade and ultimately the colonial period. This model has been questioned as archaeologists have challenged diffusionary assumptions (Chapter 13) and unilinear evolutionary schema, emphasizing instead the importance of regional environmental variability in structuring cultural change. However, such universal schema still dominate many representations of West African history, as they are disseminated to students and to people outside of the disciplines of history and archaeology. This chapter offers a brief overview of the last 2,000 years of West African history from a perspective at odds with simplistic 442 SCOTT MACEACHERN progressive schemes of cultural evolution. It seeks to evaluate cultural and historical continuities across time and space, taking into account geographical and temporal variability in cultural trajectories through this part of the African continent. Changing Environments and Human Settlement By A.D. 1, people had occupied West Africa for many millennia, and a variety of geographical and environmental continuities had affected them (Chapters 7, 9). Perhaps most important was the interplay of global climatic systems that produce the east–west environmental zones across the subcontinent (Chapter 9). The boundaries between these zones varied greatly in the past, as for example when the Sahara virtually disappeared in the Early Holocene (Chapters 7, 8, 10) and then reappeared in the drier conditions that held after 5000 b.c. They continue to vary today. By 2,000 years ago, the Sahara had expanded roughly to its modern extent, transforming woodlands, grasslands, and river systems into desert and semi-desert in a complex sequence of climatic cycles over thousands of years. Environmental change of this magnitude elicited a variety of different adaptive responses (R. McIntosh 2000), including modifications to the complex systems of seasonal movement that are important elements in the economies of many societies in West Africa. These involve not only mobile pastoral populations (Smith 1992:143–167) but also the farmers with whom they trade and whose harvested fields their herds often graze and fertilize, as well as a variety of different specialist groups (Conte 1991). In the Inland Niger Delta (IND), the origins of modern social systems can be traced to cyclical population movements and interactions between southern Saharan communities (R. McIntosh 1993, 1998), adapting to environmental changes through the last two millennia b.c. This involved the gradual abandonment of the dying northern tributaries of the Niger, the occupation of hitherto flooded basins along the IND, and the development of a sophisticated economic system in which different ethnic groups specialized in different kinds of production activities. The archaeological traces of similar cultural interactions are found in Mauritania (Vernet 1993), Burkina Faso (Neumann and Vogelsang 1996), Ghana (Davies 1980; Shinnie and Kense 1989; Stahl 1985), and northern Nigeria and Cameroon (Breunig et al. 1996; Connah 1981). Linguistic (Fleming 1983) and genetic (Cruciani et al. 2002) data also indicate the importance and complexity of contacts between North Africa, the Sahara, and West Africa. The Saharan boundaries of West Africa were thus not impassable barriers to human movement, but rather zones of interaction and cultural innovation.The same was true of the fluctuating boundaries between the savanna and the tropical forest along the Atlantic coast. Important changes in the extent and character of forest environments took place, probably in response to the same processes that affected areas to the north (Maley 1989; Sowunmi 1981). Such variability encouraged the same kinds of population movement (both cyclical and permanent) and economic experimentation as along the southern margins of a variable Sahara. West Africa TWO THOUSAND YEARS OF WEST AFRICAN HISTORY 443 almost certainly saw population movements and cultural interactions within the tropical forest and from the forest toward the savanna to the north (MacDonald 1998a; Stahl 1985) as well as in the opposite direction. East–west connections were equally important and probably even easier given the relative constancy of environmental zones in those directions. The long-distance migrations of Fulbe and Shuwa Arab populations (Stenning 1957; Zeltner 1979) during the second millennium A.D., eastward from Senegambia and westward from the Nile Valley respectively, provide historical illustration of such processes. Both population movements significantly influenced cultural and political arrangements through the Sudanic zone of West and Central Africa. Similar east–west contacts existed further to the south, in the forests and along the Atlantic coast as well; thus, for example, common elements of ritual and material culture supported Mande-speaking trading networks (McNaughton 1992), while the coastal lagoon system between the Volta and Niger rivers offered an easy avenue for commodity movement and political interaction over hundreds of kilometers (Law 1983). West African populations had undoubtedly engaged in trade for many millennia, but by the late first millennium b.c. exchange networks broadened to encompass large areas and a wide variety of goods. A number of important sites in different areas of the West African savanna have yielded evidence for such trade. These include the Jenné-jeno site cluster in the IND of Mali, where excavations yielded significant evidence for urban development and long-distance contacts from the late first millennium B.C. until ca. A.D. 1400, and Daima in northeastern Nigeria, where settlement probably began some centuries earlier and ended in the early to mid-second millennium A.D. At Jenné-jeno, iron ore, stone, and copper were imported from substantial distances, probably using the Niger River for transport (S. McIntosh and R. McIntosh 1993a). Food preparation at Daima and other sites on the stoneless firki plains of northeastern Nigeria depended upon the import of grindstones and finer stone from sources 100–200 km distant (Connah 1981:139–140). Many of the wheeled vehicles depicted in Mauritanian rock art of the period are being pulled by cattle, not horses – which may indicate use of carts for haulage, rather than chariots in warfare (Vernet 1993:322–324). These communities were, by A.D. 1, enmeshed in a continuous process of adaptation to complex and variable environments, and such adaptations would likely have favored widespread contacts between peoples. Economy and Technology at the Beginning of the First Millennium The starting point of our survey is roughly the mid-point of an arid episode lasting from about 300 b.c. to a.d. 300, which was succeeded by a considerably wetter and more stable environmental regime between a.d. 300 and a.d. 1100 (Maley 1981; Nicholson 1976:73–97). This seems to have been associated with increases in site size and number, and so presumably population, through much of West Africa. Climatic variability and demands of time and labor have encouraged the development of African farming systems based upon the exploitation of a variety of domesti- 444 SCOTT MACEACHERN Figure 18.1. West African archaeological sites of the first millennium a.d. cated, semi-domesticated, and wild plant resources, specialization in certain foodproduction activities by certain groups, and detailed knowledge of a range of famine foods to be used when crops fail (Harlan 1993; Harlan et al. 1976; Chapter 10). R. McIntosh (1998) describes the appearance of such agricultural systems in the IND (Figure 18.1) based upon cattle, fish, and African rice (Oryza glaberrima), but with evidence for use of wild plants and animals as well during the late first millennium B.C. Other West African sites show similar broad-based adaptations. Bouhdida and Tin Mahham occupations on the Atlantic coast of Mauritania between 600 b.c. and a.d. 400 (Vernet 1993:343–378; 2000) depended upon cattle-herding, hunting, fishing, and shellfish-collecting, with populations at some points occupying substantial seasonal settlements. At Gajiganna and Kursakata in northeastern Nigeria, people cultivated pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum), kept domesticated cattle and small stock, hunted and fished, and made extensive use of wild grasses as a source of cereals (Breunig et al. 1996; Neumann 1999). In similar environments at Ti-nAkof and Oursi in northern Burkina Faso, there is as yet no evidence for domesticated animals, but otherwise the same food sources were used (Vogelsang et al. 1999). TWO THOUSAND YEARS OF WEST AFRICAN HISTORY 445 In savanna areas of northern Ghana, Kintampo populations of the second millennium b.c. farmed pearl millet and gathered other wild grasses and plants, while related groups living in the forests to the south made more extensive use of wild plants, including oil palm, kept sheep/goats, and hunted wild game (Chapter 9). Use of these wild species was common in West African forest subsistence systems through the first millennium a.d., perhaps accompanied by the cultivation of indigenous tubers. Stone-tool-using hunter-gatherer populations may have persisted in the West African forests until the end of the first millennium a.d. (Chapter 9), before being absorbed into neighboring farming groups. If so, they would probably have been able to furnish forest products to their farmer neighbors in exchange for cultivated goods, as Pygmy populations have in Central Africa in the recent past. Architecturally, the first millennium b.c. witnessed a significant change in West African site formation. Before this, savanna and forest sites were for the most part small and ephemeral, with slow rates of deposition of cultural material. By the middle of the first millennium b.c., the large mounds and mound clusters that are one of the most recognizable archaeological features of the West African savanna began to appear, although in many areas mound formation seems to have accelerated after A.D. 300 (Bourges et al. 1999; Connah 1981; Holl 1987; Lamotte and Marliac 1989; S. McIntosh, ed., 1995; Togola 1996; Vogelsang et al. 1999). These changes were probably associated with greater degrees of sedentism and the adoption of more permanent structures, built using clay architecture rather than organic materials. In the forest zones of Ghana, Stahl (1993:271) suggests that there may have been a shift from Kintampo rockshelters to open sites on alluvium in the first millennium b.c., a shift that made these later sites more difficult to find and identify. Remarkably few forest sites dating from between the end of the Kintampo period and a.d. 1000 have been located. By the beginning of the first millennium a.d., pottery forms one of the basic indications of human habitation on West African sites. The early first millennium a.d. saw changes in ceramic assemblages in some areas (Connah 1976:342; MacEachern 1996; S. McIntosh, ed., 1995), including increased quantities and a change from finer, thinner-walled vessels to thicker-walled pottery that would better withstand prolonged exposure to fire. This may be traced to changes in cooking techniques, from an emphasis on grilling and roasting to the boiled cereals, stews, and sauces characteristic of much of modern West African cuisine (S. McIntosh, ed., 1995:160–161), and possibly to an increase in sedentism. Such changes were of more than culinary importance; sharing of food and beer remains an important means of coordinating communal labor today. Evidence for ironworking first appears on sites in Nigeria, Cameroon, and Niger by at least 500 b.c. (Woodhouse 1998). The beginning of iron production is often seen as the most fundamental technological change during this period, so much so that archaeologists talk about the start of the Iron Age. However, such a division of West African history implies that the replacement of some kinds of stone or wooden tools (for example, axes, hoes, or different kinds of weapons) by iron is a transformative process, more important than other social or cultural processes going on at the same time. It also implies that the transition from Neolithic to Iron Age 446 SCOTT MACEACHERN was a singular event of relatively short duration (Holl 1993:330–332; Sinclair et al. 1993:3–9; Chapter 11). The date of first appearance of iron on savanna sites varies between 500 b.c. and a.d. 500, and there are cases where iron appears centuries earlier or later in neighboring areas (MacEachern 1996; Marliac and Langlois 1996; Vernet, 1993: 353–363). Varying numbers of stone tools (which are usually assumed to have been replaced by iron) continue to be found on sites where there is evidence of iron being used. There is no evidence for use of iron in the tropical forest of West Africa until after a.d. 500, in contrast to the situation in nearby areas of Central Africa, where evidence of ironworking from sites is a thousand years older (de Barros 1986:158–159; Woodhouse 1998:168–170). It is possible that the early use of iron in Central Africa is associated with banana cultivation by about 500 b.c. (Mbida et al. 2001); the two innovations together would probably have facilitated more intensive use of the forest. All of this implies a more gradual and piecemeal adoption of iron technologies than is often assumed (Chapter 11). If iron were as transformative a technology as has traditionally been thought, we might expect to see a cascade of economic and social changes quickly result from its use. Yet the correlation between adoption of iron and other such changes – in ceramic styles and architecture, or in settlement patterning – varies considerably from one part of West Africa to another, and is often weak. Iron was no doubt an important factor for the communities that adopted it, one that eventually transformed Africans societies and landscapes, but it did not do so all at once. Our picture of technological and economic patterning in West Africa in the centuries around A.D. 1 is thus extremely complex. Instead of simple and simultaneous adoptions of new technologies, we see a complex mosaic of adaptations to different and variable environments. Communities combined the use of ancient and well-understood technical systems with new approaches, involving various combinations of innovative material technologies, new agricultural elements, and new rhythms of site formation and occupation. Communities and Societies in the First Millennium A.D. Archaeologists have often assumed (below) that West African societies of two millennia ago were small in scale, without significant social hierarchies and with only local political affiliations and interests, and that more complex social and political structures were introduced from outside the subcontinent. As outlined in Chapter 13, work in the Middle Niger area throws this model into doubt. Between A.D. 400 and A.D. 900 the size and complexity of some of these sites indicate the existence of truly urban modes of life (S. McIntosh and R. McIntosh 1993a). These sites are too early to plausibly be ascribed to foreign influences. References in Islamic sources to the lands south of the Sahara date only to the eighth century A.D. onward (Levtzion and Hopkins 1981:19ff), although these initial contacts probably took place along trade routes that had already been in operation for some centuries. TWO THOUSAND YEARS OF WEST AFRICAN HISTORY 447 More importantly, these innovations are rooted in West African cultural developments, not North African ones. Islamic travelers in West Africa frequently expressed surprise and shock at the foreign characteristics of the communities they visited. The features of early trans-Saharan trade are indicated by discoveries at the Kissi 3 site in northeastern Burkina Faso (Magnavita et al. 2002), where graves of highstatus individuals date to the period a.d. 400–700. These graves yielded brass and other copper alloy anklets, cowrie shells, glass and carnelian beads, and weapons that had probably been brought into the region from the southern Sahara, and ultimately from North Africa and beyond. Again, the remains from Kissi 3 and related sites in the area are firmly placed within regional cultural traditions stretching back into the first millennium b.c., with mixed agricultural systems very similar to those found on contemporary West African savanna sites (Magnavita et al. 2002:38–48). The exotic goods found at Kissi 3 may well have provided new and very effective ways of signaling elite status, but there is no evidence that new social and political arrangements were introduced with trade across the desert to the north. The Méma sites west of the Middle Niger link that region with the Dhar Tichitt area of Mauritania, where over 90 habitation sites of varying sizes existed in a fourlevel settlement hierarchy between about 1500 and 500 b.c. (Holl 1993). Such hierarchies, along with the internal characteristics of regional centers, indicate some degree of political centralization at a very early period and in communities under some environmental stress. The extent to which a Dhar Tichitt polity may have served as a point of articulation between pastoralist and equestrian elites in a desiccating southern Sahara and later political organizations of the West Africa savanna zone (cf. MacDonald 1998b) remains to be investigated. The period between a.d. 300 and a.d. 1100 followed six centuries of very arid conditions, and saw significant changes in many areas of the West African savanna and forest. The sites clustered around Jenné-jeno reached their greatest size during this time, while other middle Niger mound sites also displayed impressive levels of internal complexity. In the Middle Senegal River valley, the appearance of mound (Cubalel) and flat (Sincu Bara) sites in the first millennium A.D. attests to a diversity of settlement patterns; extensive and episodic occupations at the latter site, a more settled life, and increasing populations at the former (S. McIntosh 1999c; S. McIntosh and Bocoum 2000). During the last half of the millennium, an extraordinary period of funerary mound and megalith construction began between the Niger and southern Senegambia, spreading to northern Senegal early in the second millennium A.D. (S. McIntosh and R. McIntosh 1993b; Raimbault and Sanogo, eds., 1991). To this point relatively little has been published on the occupation sites that presumably accompany these funeral monuments in Senegambia (cf. Lawson 2001). Between the Senegal River and Nouakchott to the north, “medieval” Mauritanian populations of the late first millennium a.d. abandoned the mixed pastoral/marine orientations of their Bouhdida and Tin Mahham predecessors to follow a more specialized pastoral way of life (Vernet 1993:365–376). A substantial episode of mound formation began in northern Burkina Faso early in the first millennium a.d. The Oursi and Saouga sites show evidence for millet cultivation, and for the cultivation of pulses (Voandzeia groundnuts and cowpeas 448 SCOTT MACEACHERN [Vigna unguiculata]) and exploitation of a variety of tree species, including jujube, karité, and acacia (Neumann and Vogelsang 1996; Vogelsang et al. 1999). These plants and their various products are still essential to West African agricultural systems. At the same time, rates of sediment accumulation and artifact deposition increase on sites in the southern Lake Chad basin, including Daima, Houlouf, Kursakata, Aissa Dugjé, and Mege, and architectural features like potsherd pavements and external walls appear (Bourges et al. 1999; Connah, 1981:165; Gronenborn 1998; Holl 1988). It is likely that occupation of many of the “Sao” mound sites of northern Cameroon and Chad excavated by Jean-Paul and Annie Lebeuf and their collaborators (A. Lebeuf et al. 1980; J.-P. Lebeuf 1969) began during this period as well. Settlement intensity in the Diamaré region of northern Cameroon, at Salak and Mongossi for example, seems to increase significantly during the middle of the first millennium a.d. (Marliac 1991:713–793; Marliac and Langlois 1996). Mound sites are relatively easy to locate during survey work, and it is probable that many people living in the region during the first millennium a.d. did not live in these communities. There does, however, seem to be a real change in the intensity of occupation in some regions. A variety of factors may have contributed, including the effects of the a.d. 300 climatic amelioration. Data from Mauritania and Mali indicate that agricultural systems were becoming more specialized over this period, with a greater differentiation between farmers and pastoralists. Increased sedentism associated with more specialized farming techniques would have in turn affected the rate of accumulation of sediments on sites. Greater use of iron and the introduction of a new cereal crop, sorghum (Sorghum bicolor) may have increased the productivity of agricultural systems, although whether sorghum was in widespread use before the late first millennium a.d. remains debatable (Connah 1981:189; S. McIntosh, ed., 1995:350; Magnavita 2002; Neumann 1999; RowleyConwy et al. 1999). Millet continues to dominate in most areas. Archaeologists know much less about occupation in and around the West African tropical forest in the first millennium a.d., in large part because of problems with survey in forested environments. Sites like Daboya (Shinnie and Kense 1989), Begho/Atwetwebooso (Stahl 1994:80) and Bono Manso (Effah-Gyamfi 1985:79– 86, 206) just north of the forest in Ghana, indicate the presence of iron-using populations early in the millennium, but there is little evidence for iron use in the forest or on the coast. If Stahl’s (1993) hypothesis that post-Kintampo farmers in this area were living on open sites in alluvium is correct, it may be that forest-dwelling populations were too small or mobile, or sedimentation rates too high, for sites of the period to easily be found. Excavations at Adansemanso, near Kumasi in central Ghana, indicate that this situation had changed by the end of the first millennium a.d. (Vivian 1996). The linear mounds found on the Adansemanso site are not like the contemporary, generally circular, mounds found to the north, but they display evidence for substantial architectural features, including clay-lined pits and floors. The intensity and complexity of settlement in southern Nigeria by the time of European contact from the 15th century A.D. imply a significant period of in situ development in that area. Again, however, details of such occupations are scarce. TWO THOUSAND YEARS OF WEST AFRICAN HISTORY 449 Settlement at the urban center of Ife probably began late in the first millennium a.d. (Shaw 1980:377), although we know little about the processes through which such occupation took place. Darling (1984, 1998) placed the early construction phases of the remarkable earthwork complexes of the Benin/Ishan region – over 16,000 linear kilometers of earthworks in a 4,000 km2 area – in the same period. These processes of forest colonization and land partitioning may parallel the cultural trajectories that resulted in sites like Adansemanso in Ghana (above), albeit with different material results. In both Nigeria and Ghana, evidence for human activity in the forest is more abundant after the beginning of the second millennium a.d. (e.g., Ogundiran 2002). The extraordinary site of Igbo-Ukwu (Shaw 1970) in southeastern Nigeria, with its burial chamber and storage areas, its beautiful cast bronzes and vast numbers of beads, similarly dates to the late first millennium a.d. and lacks local precedents. The Igbo-Ukwu glass beads are exotic to the region, although their ultimate point of origin – Venice, the Near East, and India have all been suggested – and the routes by which they arrived in Nigeria, whether across the Sahara or westward from the Nile Valley, are not definitively known (Insoll and Shaw 1997; Sutton 2001). This implies that the forest zone of southern Nigeria was by this time tied into continental trading networks that spanned a significant part of the Old World, but there is little other proof of such contacts. Even more perplexing than the external relations of Igbo-Ukwu is the matter of its local meaning. The contents of the site suggest burial of a very important person indeed, someone whom archaeologists would in other contexts identify as a member of a local elite group, perhaps a king. The Igbo peoples who inhabit the area today are, however, relatively egalitarian, without the sort of centralized political hierarchy that would concentrate so much wealth in the burial of a ruler. The ritual contexts of the burial are similar to that of a holder of the title eze nri, an important social and ritual status in modern Igbo society (Ray 1987; Shaw 1970:268–270), although there are also significant differences between Igbo-Ukwu and recent Ibo practice. These complexities in interpreting Igbo-Ukwu should serve as a cautionary tale for researchers: we are often too willing to impose modern assumptions about power and prestige on ancient cases that may have worked according to very different logics. Such assumptions implicitly deny the historicity and dynamism of West African societies through time. They also ignore the effects of cultural disruptions during the slave trade and colonial periods, and more recently. As we will see below, David and Sterner (1999), R. McIntosh (1999), and S. McIntosh (1999a) argue that social and political systems in the Mandara Mountains and along the Middle Niger could in fact diverge considerably from recently attested examples, with changes in those characteristics sometimes happening quite quickly. Guyer and Belinga (1995), using data from Equatorial Africa, present a model of social action and knowledge not well reflected in dominant reconstructions of “traditional” African societies. Such investigations, sensitive to changes in meaning and organization through space and time, could profitably be extended to other areas of West Africa as well. 450 SCOTT MACEACHERN Political Structures: Hierarchy and Heterarchy, States and Non-States How do we think about political structures in West Africa during the late first and early second millennium A.D.? Early research assumed that these would look like their presumed antecedents north of the Sahara, particularly in their political and religious characteristics. Under the influence of social evolutionary thought, it was further assumed that simple, egalitarian societies developed into complex and hierarchical ones through a succession of stages (cf. Chapters 1, 13, 16). In a parallel process rooted in British social anthropology, African political systems were dichotomized into “stateless” (or “tribal”) and “state” forms (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940; Horton 1976), with the former occupying subordinate and peripheral statuses, although capable in some cases of evolving into states. These models serve a valuable purpose when they are used to look for common features in cultural systems and processes of social and political change, but become much less useful when they obscure the particularities of specific historical sequences. Over the last decade, critiques of such models have multiplied, in both African and non-African contexts (S. McIntosh 1999b; Possehl 1998; Sharpe 1986; Stahl 1999; Yoffee 1991). Igbo-Ukwu has provided more material for reconstructions of ancient systems of authority than has almost any contemporary site in West Africa, and those materials are profoundly ambiguous. On the one hand, the material symbolism can be interpreted in modern terms, associated with an important ritual leader in a society without centralized political power. On the other hand, the richness of the remains may indicate that such power was more concentrated in a single person or status in the past. In that case, are we looking at a case of political “devolution” (S. McIntosh 1999b) from more to less centralized political hierarchy, a direction of development opposite to that assumed by the evolutionary models mentioned above? Use of the term “devolution” suggests some decrease in complexity, perhaps even a loss of vitality; however, neither image agrees well with the vibrancy of communities in southern Nigeria as Europeans encountered them from the 16th century onward (Hodgkins 1975; Pacheco Pereira 1937). The evidence for first-millennium political hierarchies and state development in other areas of West Africa is equally ambiguous. As outlined in Chapter 13, Susan and Roderick McIntosh (R. McIntosh 1993; S. McIntosh 1999a; S. McIntosh and R. McIntosh, 1993a) argue that models of centralized, hierarchical power do not fully explain features of the site clusters at Jenné-jeno and elsewhere in the IND, nor cultural dynamics in the Méma and the Middle Senegal Valley. Heterarchical models, which emphasize complex relationships between unranked or variably ranked elements in a system (Ehrenreich et al., eds., 1995), may prove useful in analyzing these communities. There is, however, other evidence for hierarchy in social and political relations in this part of West Africa. Jenné-jeno seems to have declined in importance early in the second millennium A.D., after evidence for defensive wall construction and TWO THOUSAND YEARS OF WEST AFRICAN HISTORY 451 contacts with North Africa appears, and was abandoned by about A.D. 1400. The funeral mounds found between the Niger River and Senegambia are frequently accompanied by rich burial goods, and on at least one occasion (at Koï Gourrey) by what seem to be human sacrifices (Connah 2001:125–130; R. McIntosh 1998:219–233). These sites appear to provide substantial evidence for concentrations of wealth and power in the hands of local elites. However, we should remember the example of Igbo-Ukwu when evaluating such sites. Roderick McIntosh (1998:227–229) raises the possibility that at least some of them are associated with small-scale political units interacting across the region, but still displaying relatively low levels of inter-community conflict and intra-community stratification. (It appears unlikely that such explanations can comfortably accommodate the dead at Koï Gourrey.) This provides an alternative to explanations that use Arabic historical sources (Levtzion and Hopkins 1981:77–110) to emphasize processes of state formation and elite conversion to Islam between the Niger and Senegal rivers at the end of the first millennium A.D. There is clustering of mound sites in northern Burkina Faso (Vogelsang et al. 1999:53, 59) and around the Mandara Mountains in Cameroon and Nigeria, where both inselberg edges and river margins served as foci for human settlement (Bourges et al. 1999; Langlois 1995; Marliac et al. 2000:71–73). Modern villages in the latter region are often made up of clusters of spatially (and sometimes ethnically) segregated neighborhoods, which may correspond in function to such site clusters (MacEachern 2002). In the firki clay plains south of Lake Chad, a more dispersed pattern of solitary mound sites in the first and early second millennium a.d. (Connah 1981:46; J.-P. Lebeuf 1969) may relate to differential distribution of resources. There is no indication of major disparities in wealth or political power at sites like Daima (Connah 1981:99–196), Aissa Dugjé (Bourges et al. 1999), Mdaga (A. Lebeuf et al. 1980), or Salak (Marliac 1991). The horses found at Aissa Dugjé (MacEachern et al. 2001) from the middle of the first millennium A.D. onward do not themselves indicate an increase in social hierarchy, although horses later supplied vital military and symbolic support to emergent elites in the second millennium A.D. (Holl 1994). Historical sources from the second millennium A.D. (Forkl 1995; Lange 1989) indicate that local and weak hierarchical political units south of Lake Chad were incorporated into larger, centralized states. At the same time, archaeological and ethnographic evidence demonstrates the dangers of such simple models of state encroachment. Even powerful states of the late second millennium A.D. did not control all of the lands that they claimed: they were surrounded by smaller-scale and more egalitarian societies, which provided them with vitally needed resources (Reyna 1990), acted as laboratories for the development of new social and political forms (Kopytoff 1987), or both. Until the colonial period, centralized states were always associated with smaller-scale societies in this region, and the relations between these units were often extremely complex. That complexity has often been obscured in historical and ethnographic writing on the area (Sharpe 1986). Closely related communities in the Mandara region are found at a variety of levels of social and political centralization, and their transitions between such levels appear to owe 452 SCOTT MACEACHERN Figure 18.2. Abandoned stone structures in the Mandara Mountains Photo by Nicholas David; printed with permission. as much to particular historical circumstances as to universal laws of cultural evolution (David and Sterner 1999). Those transitions could involve decreases as well as increases in degree of social hierarchy and political centralization, in some cases involving abandonment of quite spectacular architectural constructions (Figure 18.2). As among the Igbo, such “devolution” appears to have taken place in a vital and expansive cultural milieu. Change and Adaptation in the Second Millennium A.D. The 12th century saw the end of a period of relatively benign climates that had lasted for about 800 years, and was succeeded by significantly less predictable climates into the modern period (Maley 1981; Nicholson 1976:98–158). This change may be associated with a gradual abandonment of savanna mound sites in many areas through the middle of the second millennium A.D. ( J.-P. Lebeuf 1969; R. McIntosh 1998:241–250; Marliac et al. 2000:75; Sanogo 1991; Togola 1996:105; Vogelsang et al. 1999:65). North of the forests, the increasing importance of expansionist states, with elite ideological charters increasingly marked by adherence to Islam, probably played a role in this process as well. The historical narratives of second-millennium West Africa emphasize state formation and imperial grandeur. That grandeur often came, however, at the expense of rich agrarian traditions that had to that point persisted for many centuries. Those traditions did not, however, disappear after a.d. 1200. West Africans since that time have existed in a world in which states have become steadily more hier- TWO THOUSAND YEARS OF WEST AFRICAN HISTORY 453 archical and hegemonic, extending their control over larger and larger areas. At the same time, many communities maintained a surprising degree of local integrity well into the 20th century.The abundant evidence for human migration through the last millennium (Brooks 1993; Lentz 2000; McNaughton 1992; Rossi et al. 1991) testifies in part to the desire for individual and community autonomy among African populations.There is also, however, a great deal of evidence for continuity in human culture through these periods, in economies and technology, and even in many elements of ideology and ritual systems (R. McIntosh 1993; McNaughton 1992). I will assume such continuity through my description of events during the second millennium A.D., and concentrate instead on changes through this period.This may yield a more fragmented view of African history over the last eight centuries, but such fragmentation is also characteristic of archaeological research during this period, as investigators struggle to reconcile their data with the historical and ethnographic record. Historical narratives of empire have significantly affected the way archaeology has been done in West Africa as research focused on locating population centers associated with second-millennium states, and detecting foreign cultural contacts. The reasons for this are straightforward: Arabic written accounts were privileged as historical sources, because West African societies were supposed to have “entered history” (Trevor-Roper 1965) through Arab contact, and those accounts particularly emphasized population centers. Significant fieldwork has taken place at a number of large settlement sites in West Africa (Figure 18.3): (1) Jenné-jeno (abandoned ca. A.D. 1400); (2) Kumbi Saleh (occupied through the first half of the millennium – Berthier 1997); (3) Tegdaoust (between the eighth and 12th centuries – Devisse 1983; Polet 1985; Robert et al., eds., 1970; Robert-Chaleix 1989); (4) Gao (from the seventh to the 19th centuries – Insoll 1996); (5) Hamdallahi (occupied for a short period in the 19th century – Mayor et al. 1990); (6) Begho (ca. a.d. 1100–1800 – Crossland and Posnansky 1978); (7) Old Oyo (most of the second millennium A.D. – Soper and Darling 1980): (8) Ife (late in the first millennium a.d. until the present – Shaw 1980); and (9) Benin City (from the 13th to the 19th centuries a.d. – Connah 1972). A number of other important sites occupied during this period, including Timbuktu, Kano, and other Hausa urban sites in northern Nigeria and Kong in Côte d’Ivoire, have not been systematically examined. Archaeologists now know a substantial amount about chronologies of occupation on these sites, although there is as always more to be done. Excavations have generated data on exchange systems and cultural contacts within and beyond West Africa, and especially with the Arab world. Indeed, in many of these cases we know more about such long-distance connections than about relations between the people occupying these sites and their neighbors living in smaller-scale communities only a few kilometers away (see Chapter 13). This “city-centric” view of cultural processes is often accompanied by a corresponding lack of attention to regional settlement systems (S. McIntosh and R. McIntosh 1984:76–84). With few exceptions (i.e., Jenné-jeno and Benin City), little is known about these sites in regional contexts. 454 SCOTT MACEACHERN Figure 18.3. West African archaeological sites of the second millennium a.d. These large settlements are quite variable in their characteristics. Sahelian and savanna communities (including Jenné-jeno, Kumbi Saleh, Tegdaoust, and Gao) flourished in the early second millennium A.D., but many declined in population and importance at mid-millennium, a decline probably associated with climate change and increased levels of state conflict. Large settlement sites at the edge of and within the forests appear to persist longer, to varying degrees supported and ultimately destabilized by European trade and contacts. Size – in hectares and in human numbers – and layout of these large sites varied widely, affected on the one hand by limits on population densities and governability, and on the other hand by necessities of defense (Fletcher 1998). The ramifying earthwork complexes around and beyond Benin City (Darling 1984) indicate that a simple rural/urban dichotomy may not reflect the complexity of African settlement systems. Historical and archaeological data indicate the sophistication of the communities that occupied these sites.The artistic traditions of southwestern Nigeria (Willett and Eyo 1980), with figures depicted in bronze/brass, ceramics, and stone, offer a striking testament to an extraordinarily accomplished group of artisans. The imported goods found throughout West Africa, from the marble gravestones near TWO THOUSAND YEARS OF WEST AFRICAN HISTORY 455 Gao on the Niger River to the scattered trade beads found on sites across the subcontinent (Connah 2001:139; Insoll 1996:17–24, 58), show the reach (although certainly not the magnitude) of external trade systems. The remarkable cache of hippopotamus ivory found in Gao (Insoll 1995) provides rare archaeological evidence of the African goods (especially gold, slaves, and ivory) that would have been exported in return (also Stahl and Stahl 2004). For the most part, however, these investigations have not really challenged pre-existing historical assumptions about the development of these settlements, or of the political units of which they were a part. They are still all too often treated as isolated occurrences, lacking social and cultural context. Even less is known about the villages, hamlets, and homesteads where the vast majority of West Africans lived through the second millennium A.D. Few research projects integrate prehistoric data with historical and ethnographic information on recent communities. In northern Cameroon, investigation by French researchers in the Diamaré region has resulted in such a sequence (Marliac and Langlois 1996; Marliac et al. 2000), based primarily on ceramic variation and changes in site occupation that track regional cultural traditions into the historic period. The authors note that such research should not be thought of as a form of “palaeo-ethnohistory,” devoted to establishing the origins of modern ethnic groups, themselves dynamic and changeable entities. Rather, historical and archaeological research most fruitfully meshes in regional analyses of cultural process and interaction. In this area, the disruptions of the early second millennium A.D. were followed by changes in indigenous material culture, but also by an increasing level of regional population migrations, as Sudanic states (Kanem, Borno, Wandala, and so on) exerted control at longer distances from their centers. In the Chad basin to the north, indigenous populations were politically, and eventually ethnically, incorporated into those same states (Connah 1981; Gronenborn 2001; Holl 1994), a fascinating comparative example of the effects of state formation and expansion on a regional level. In the IND, Swiss researchers have taken the opposite approach, combining ethnoarchaeological research on modern ceramic traditions with archaeological research designed to place those traditions in historical context (Gallay 1994; Gallay et al. 1995; Huysecom and Mayor 1995). This has resulted in a very useful analysis of the development of material culture distributions among Fulbe, Songhai, and other ethnic groups, but such a direct historical approach does not easily lend itself to the examination of very great time depths. On the other hand, examination of the history of Dogon groups has generated a great deal of data on population movements and recombinations in this part of southern Mali (Bedaux and Lange 1983; Gallay et al. 1995). Work in Bassar territories in modern Togo (de Barros 2001) has focused on significant scales of iron production and export, and provides an effective counterexample to the assumption that cultural change in West Africa during the mid-second millennium A.D. was invariably linked to European influence (below). Intensification of iron production in this region began around A.D. 1300, for local use and export, and was associated with indigenous technological and political 456 SCOTT MACEACHERN developments (de Barros 2001:64–75). Use of both locally made and imported pottery seems to have increased with the greater populations and prosperity that this iron industry made possible. This area was somewhat sheltered from direct European influence until late in the 18th century, when an increase in slave-raiding led to some changes in settlement patterning but does not seem to have disrupted iron production. It was only a century later, just before the arrival of German colonialists in the 1890s, that ironworking declined in the region. It has often been assumed that West African ironworking traditions were destroyed by competition from European imports by the end of the 18th century, but Goucher (1981) suggests that African iron stock remained quite competitive and that abandonment of these ironworking industries was in large part due to environmental change, particularly deforestation. In southwestern Nigeria, Nigerian archaeologists have undertaken very fruitful investigations of interactions between the well-known major polities of the region, Ile-Ife, Benin, and Old Oyo, and the impacts of those centers upon their hinterlands through the second millennium A.D. (Ogundiran 2002; Usman 2001). One goal of this research has been the examination of the ways in which regions peripheral to those centers participated in the economic, cultural, and political processes that led to state formation in this area in the period before European contact. Core–periphery and frontier models have been used extensively in this analysis, offering a theoretical understanding of these processes that goes well beyond traditional concerns with chronology and large urban sites. Research on cultural change in Senegambia over the period A.D. 1500–1900 (Guèye 2002; McIntosh and Thiaw 2001) has examined the impact of the transAtlantic slave trade, and more generally changes in lifeways through a turbulent period. Ceramic data lend some support to the idea that social systems were disturbed (possibly by slave-raiding, warfare, and/or environmental reverses) in the Middle Senegal Valley, but other areas seem to have gained population, and there is evidence for broad continuity in social systems and elite burial ritual through the area. Such syntheses are valuable, because they provide an alternative to historical schema that assume such periods to be dominated by a rupture between “pre[European] contact” and “post-contact” social circumstances. The Vectors of European Contact The most ambitious attempt to transcend such a dichotomized view of West African history is Stahl’s (2001) work in the Banda area of central Ghana. Stahl used data from the archaeological sites of Kuulo Kataa and Makala Kataa, occupied over the period A.D. 1350–1900, as well as African and European historical sources, to examine second-millennium cultural processes in this region. This project has been directed toward two broad goals: analysis of the ways in which Banda social systems were embedded within wider political economies, at regional to intercontinental scales; and examination of the production of Banda history by local people and by outsiders. As in the contemporary societies of Bassar territory to the east, evidence TWO THOUSAND YEARS OF WEST AFRICAN HISTORY 457 of subsistence activity, craft production, and trade in Banda indicates a complex history of relations with neighboring communities, including the town of Begho. The picture that emerges is of small-scale communities responsive to external influences, whether from the savanna trading states to the north, the expansive Asante kingdom of the late 18th century, the forces of Samori in the 19th century, or European contact. At the same time, such exotic elements were being reformulated and incorporated into indigenous cultural structures. Historical accounts have conventionally treated this period as one where African communities opened up to a wider world, but Stahl’s data are more complex, indicating both expansions and contractions of trade and regional linkages over the last half of the second millennium A.D. This study provides a fascinating glimpse of community life on an internal frontier (Kopytoff 1987) through a tumultuous time. Direct European contact with West Africa began in the middle of the 15th century A.D. Over the next 150 years, European powers gradually extended their trading and military networks eastward along the Atlantic coast, from Mauritania to Cameroon, and the contexts of European contact are generally held to have involved trade, raids, diplomacy, and eventually governance and conversion. However, this view ignores some of the most important forms of contact, which were never systematically documented. For example, New World food crops – especially maize, sweet potatoes, peanuts, and tobacco – spread far beyond sites where contact was taking place, becoming staple crops in some areas (Alpern 1991; Philips 1983) and drastically changing African agricultural systems. Tobacco pipes and evidence of maize use (grains themselves, or the use of cobs as roulettes) are occasionally found on West African archaeological sites (e.g., Connah 1981:165; Effah-Gyamfi 1985; Jones 2001:57; Stahl 2001:134, 140–143;Wesler 1998:11–14), and indicate that these domesticates spread very quickly indeed away from the shores of the Atlantic. This introduction of New World domesticates was just one element in the continuing development of West African farming practices, which had seen the increasing use of indigenous sorghum by the early second millennium A.D., and probably agricultural and culinary influences from the Mediterranean basin and Asia in the same period. Most archaeological research on the last five centuries in West Africa has involved investigation of the encounter between Europeans and Africans. Much has taken place at coastal trading sites, including Elmina in Ghana (DeCorse 2001a), and Savi and Ouidah in Bénin (Kelly 1997, 2001). A primary goal of these projects has been examination of the lifeways of inhabitants of these settlements, using interpretive models in which the agency and activity of Africans are explicitly recognized. Researchers emphasize the degree to which Europeans and European practices and technologies were incorporated into cultural systems that remain distinctively African, and the strategies employed by African elites to manage the opportunities and dangers presented by the newcomers. This approach parallels recent historical writing on the area (Brooks 1993). At the same time, the histories of these sites – Elmina and Ouidah developing as appendages to European outposts, Savi destroyed in a struggle for control over the slave trade – remind us that 458 SCOTT MACEACHERN these African initiatives developed in a context of increasing European domination along the coasts of West Africa, and ultimately inland as well. Some archaeological preservation work has been undertaken at other contactperiod sites along the Atlantic coast, including Cape Coast Castle and Fort St. Jago in Ghana and Gorée in Senegal (DeCorse 2001b:8–9; Samb 1997). These sites figure prominently in national and international initiatives designed to open West Africa up to cultural tourism (Bruner 1996). Many of them were directly associated with the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and it is ironic that such tourism focuses upon the experiences of Africans only as they enter slavery and the European world, rather than upon their lives before that. Archaeological research has provided valuable data on the varying cultural encounters between Europeans and Africans that accompanied the trans-Atlantic trade (e.g., articles in DeCorse, ed. 2001). However, DeCorse (2001b) points out that virtually all of this work has been done on European structures and precincts, with far less attention paid to African settlement areas. Relatively little work has been undertaken on the material features and processes of the slave trade itself, beyond these investigations of its architecture and some research on the social transformations that accompanied that trade in different parts of West Africa (Holl 2001; MacEachern 2001). There has been very little archaeological research undertaken at contact sites away from the West African coast, but work has been done at Fort Senudébu on the Faleme River in Senegal (McIntosh and Thiaw 2001), Fort Ruychaver in southern Ghana (Posnansky and van Dantzig 1976, in Wesler 1998:16–17) and the early 20th-century British colonial settlement at Zungeru in northern Nigeria (Ogedengbe 1998). There is obviously a great deal of potential in the further study of cultural interactions away from the Atlantic coast, for periods of initial contact and for the slave trade and colonial periods. Conclusion West African history over the last 2,000 years cannot usefully be encompassed within a set of progressive transitions between contrasted and idealized cultural forms: Neolithic to Iron Age, statelessness to states, pre- and post-European contact. Neither can it be described as a steady progression toward any sort of evolutionary goal. Despite the claims of an earlier generation of researchers, the continent certainly has had a history, but that history has not been directed toward any final end: reality – like archaeology – is messier, and more interesting, than that. The data indicate a situation well known to archaeologists working in other areas of the world, where a great diversity of local cultural elements and historical sequences coexists with broad commonalities at a regional and even subcontinental level. There is evidence in different areas for population increase and decline, for variable degrees of political centralization, and for the productive interaction of very different economic and social systems. In these interactions, zones of environmental transition played a vital role, acting not as barriers to human movement but as privileged locations allowing access to diverse resources. TWO THOUSAND YEARS OF WEST AFRICAN HISTORY 459 There is a great deal that archaeologists do not know about West African history during the last two millennia. Many of these gaps in our knowledge are the result of environmental and political conditions that restrict the ability of researchers to work in certain areas (Chapter 17). We are even today faced with the necessity of building basic archaeological chronologies and culture histories for many areas of West Africa, and with the need for far more detailed understandings of cultural processes almost everywhere.We especially need to learn more about such processes throughout the forest zones for this period, and far more – indeed, almost everything – about the prehistory of the countries between Ghana and Senegal. Other gaps reflect the size of the subcontinent, and the small number of people who have worked there. Still others can be traced back to the preoccupations of different archaeologists, the problems that are seen as most important, and the deference sometimes accorded to historical sources. Archaeologists working in West Africa have tended to use systems of interpretation developed for other areas of the world, formulated with other goals in mind, and inappropriate to West African cases. There is, however, no real reason why such paradigms need to be used, and researchers working in this part of Africa are increasingly developing interpretations that try to avoid resort to the dismissive assumptions that plagued earlier systems. 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