Networked Farmers, Ancestral Rituals, Regional Marketplaces, and Salt: New Insights into the Complexity of First Millennium BC/AD Farming Societies in West Africa

Abstract

In West Africa, there is a disjuncture between historical processes in the second millennium BC and late first millennium AD due to a comparative lack of archaeological data. In the Mouhoun Bend of western Burkina Faso, recent research has found that beginning in the second quarter of the first millennium BC, a landscape emerged of dispersed agricultural homesteads spaced 1–3 km apart. This paper synthesizes published data from the basal levels (Yellow I subphase) of the site of Kirikongo, adds new survey and excavation data from three sites identified by the Kirikongo Regional Project, and integrates data from previous archaeological research in the region. During Yellow I, Mouhoun Bend residents lived in economically generalized multi-family houses that produced their own material culture (ceramics, iron), farmed, kept domestic animals, fished, hunted, and managed wild plants. Funerary rituals involved the creation of earthen structures and the ritualized deposition of material culture and food remains in pits or concavities. Comparing these sites with contemporary and earlier communities in the region including Kintampo, Rim, and Jenne-jeno, we argue that West Africa from the second millennium BC through the early first millennium AD was home to a complex and culturally diverse interconnected network of dispersed farming societies. The capillary network they created facilitated broader trade and exchange including transfers of technologies and new economic resources throughout the region. The emergence of early marketplace centers was supported by and served these networks and may have been linked to mineral salt production and/or exchange.