Reviews
The volume is nicely produced and is a useful contribution to our understanding of the medieval (Iron Age) archaeology of West Africa, and is achieved in a theoretically mature manner.Antiquity
Assembling the Village in Medieval Bambuk
An Archaeology of Interaction at Diouboye, Senegal
Cameron Gokee [+–]
Appalachian State University
Cameron Gokee is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Appalachian State University. His research focuses on the interplay between village communities and historical landscapes in the Senegambia region of West Africa.
Winner of the 2016-2018 Book Prize of the Society of Africanist Archaeologists (SAfA).
The land of Bambuk was an important source of gold for trans-Saharan trade and the imperial polities of Ghana and Mali, yet the non-centralized societies of this region remain largely peripheral in the historiography of West Africa. Drawing on recent archaeological research at the site of Diouboye in eastern Senegal, this book explores social life in medieval Bambuk from the standpoint of a village occupied over several centuries (1000-1400 CE). Material and spatial data from excavations, together with those from survey of the middle Falemme River basin, enable a critical look at how interactions across multiple scales—among neighboring houses, between cultural and craft traditions, and within a much broader political economy—created both possibilities for and challenges to the ongoing production of a local community at Diouboye. By moving back and forth across these scales centered on a single village, Assembling the Village in Medieval Bambuk outlines a relational archaeology of community applicable to the study of seemingly peripheral societies and processes of pre-modern globalization across Africa and beyond.
Table of Contents
Preliminaries
List of Figures [+–] x-xv
The land of Bambuk was an important source of gold for trans-Saharan trade and the imperial polities of Ghana and Mali, yet the non-centralized societies of this region remain largely peripheral in the historiography of West Africa. Drawing on recent archaeological research at the site of Diouboye in eastern Senegal, this book explores social life in medieval Bambuk from the standpoint of a village occupied over several centuries (1000-1400 CE). Material and spatial data from excavations, together with those from survey of the middle Falemme River basin, enable a critical look at how interactions across multiple scales—among neighboring houses, between cultural and craft traditions, and within a much broader political economy—created both possibilities for and challenges to the ongoing production of a local community at Diouboye. By moving back and forth across these scales centered on a single village, Assembling the Village in Medieval Bambuk outlines a relational archaeology of community applicable to the study of seemingly peripheral societies and processes of pre-modern globalization across Africa and beyond.
List of Tables [+–] xvi-xvii
The land of Bambuk was an important source of gold for trans-Saharan trade and the imperial polities of Ghana and Mali, yet the non-centralized societies of this region remain largely peripheral in the historiography of West Africa. Drawing on recent archaeological research at the site of Diouboye in eastern Senegal, this book explores social life in medieval Bambuk from the standpoint of a village occupied over several centuries (1000-1400 CE). Material and spatial data from excavations, together with those from survey of the middle Falemme River basin, enable a critical look at how interactions across multiple scales—among neighboring houses, between cultural and craft traditions, and within a much broader political economy—created both possibilities for and challenges to the ongoing production of a local community at Diouboye. By moving back and forth across these scales centered on a single village, Assembling the Village in Medieval Bambuk outlines a relational archaeology of community applicable to the study of seemingly peripheral societies and processes of pre-modern globalization across Africa and beyond.
Acknowledgements [+–] xviii-xx
The land of Bambuk was an important source of gold for trans-Saharan trade and the imperial polities of Ghana and Mali, yet the non-centralized societies of this region remain largely peripheral in the historiography of West Africa. Drawing on recent archaeological research at the site of Diouboye in eastern Senegal, this book explores social life in medieval Bambuk from the standpoint of a village occupied over several centuries (1000-1400 CE). Material and spatial data from excavations, together with those from survey of the middle Falemme River basin, enable a critical look at how interactions across multiple scales—among neighboring houses, between cultural and craft traditions, and within a much broader political economy—created both possibilities for and challenges to the ongoing production of a local community at Diouboye. By moving back and forth across these scales centered on a single village, Assembling the Village in Medieval Bambuk outlines a relational archaeology of community applicable to the study of seemingly peripheral societies and processes of pre-modern globalization across Africa and beyond.
Chapter 1
This chapter introduces the main question motivating the book, namely how village communities in the medieval Western Sudan emerged through interactions at local, regional, and global scales. After situating this question in a broader anthropological discourse about globalization, the chapter first traces how tropes of timelessness and powerlessness have become tied to the concept of the village, then argues for a relational perspective on the active production of time, space, and social being in such local communities. Archaeologists can mobilize this perspective through the study of materiality and space at multiple scales in and around villages—the microscale of social actors and houses, the mesoscale of regional landscapes and cultural traditions, and the macroscale of an interregional political and economic mosaic. The chapter concludes by introducing a relational perspective to the historical production of community in and around the archaeological site of Diouboye, a medieval village in the gold-producing land of Bambuk.
Chapter 2
A Medieval Mosaic in the Western Sudan [+–] 23-42
This chapter outlines the scales of analysis and evidentiary sources that inform the study of the Western Sudan during the 9-15th century medieval era, while at the same time examining the murky views of Bambuk perpetuated in this historiography. Drawing on the relational concept of a mosaic, the chapter then sketches the cultural traditions, historical processes, and institutions—subsistence regimes, craft economies, trade networks, and Islam—that shaped, and were shaped by, interregional interactions across the Western Sudan. The result is a macroscalar frame for the archaeological study of relations intersecting in the village communities of medieval Bambuk.
Chapter 3
In Search of Bambuk [+–] 43-59
This chapter narrows in on the regional landscape of Upper Senegal from the past few centuries to develop a context-specific framework for mapping relations between Diouboye and its neighbors along the Falemme River. After describing the physical geography and climate history of Upper Senegal, the history of this region is summarized in terms of cultural groups living there today, while also exploring the ways in which social institutions and identities may have themselves been negotiated at multiple scales. The result is a history of Upper Senegal that foregrounds the social production of local village communities in relation to people, things, and places across the landscape.
Chapter 4
Everyday Life in the Land of Gold [+–] 60-87
Drawing mostly, though not exclusively, on the ethnography of Malinke societies with direct historical ties to the land of Bambuk, this chapter paints a portrait of everyday interaction from the 18th century onwards that, when viewed against the historical backdrop of the previous two chapters, offers a means of “upstreaming” into the medieval era at the microscale of the village and the mesoscale of the regional landscape. The chapter begins by defining the key institutions of house and lineage, then moves to describe some of the subsistence regimes, craft economies, exchange networks, and religious rituals that would have recursively shaped interactions among people and things in the village of Diouboye.
Chapter 5
This chapter connects ethnographic and historical accounts of village life in Upper Senegal with archaeological data documenting past material and spatial practices. Following a preview of the architectural features and depositional contexts that shaped, and were shaped by, histories of interaction at Diouboye, the chapter introduces artifacts, including domestic equipment, craft goods, trade items, ritual paraphernalia, and plant and animal remains, assembled in these and other medieval contexts along the lower Falemme River.
Chapter 6
Spaces of Interaction: Houses and Quarters [+–] 118-141
Deploying a micro-scale GIS analysis of surface artifacts and features, this chapter maps the spatial and material practices that underwrote relations of power and community across Diouboye. After summarizing the methods used for surface collection and mapping, the chapter defines the units—namely areas and quarters—that framed the relational histories of neighboring houses in village. A comparison of artifactual and architectural data from these units reveals how spatial relations of distance and segregation intersected with socio-material interactions at multiple scales, at least during the final phase of occupation at Diouboye.
Chapter 7
Depositional Histories I: The East Quarter [+–] 142-184
This chapter draws on the material practices and depositional pathways introduced in Chapter 5 to consider how subsurface artifacts and features were enrolled into everyday interactions within and between houses in the East Quarter of Diouboye and how these patterns persisted and/or changed through time. These material histories, in turn, provide a point of departure in subsequent chapters for tracing interactions outwards in social and physical space to the West Quarter of the village and beyond.
Chapter 8
This chapter describes how subsurface artifacts and features were enrolled into everyday interactions within and between houses in the West Quarter of Diouboye and how these patterns persisted and/or changed through time. The chapter concludes by anchoring the site-level chronology to a series of radiocarbon dates from stratified contexts in both the East and West Quarters.
Chapter 9
Landscape and Interaction [+–] 217-252
This chapter explores the interplay between village and landscape in the context of medieval Bambuk through the results of an archaeological survey centered on Diouboye. Beginning with a review of the sampling strategy and methods deployed to record sites in this study area, the chapter then presents the spatial and material data for successive periods of occupation, including the results of surface mapping and test excavations at the Iron Age site of Baganafara and the Atlantic Era component of FAL-1075. When set against the ethnographic and historical background of the region outlined in Chapters 2-4, these data make it possible to “upstream” from the late-19th century landscape of culturally diverse villages under the rule of the Bundu almaamate to the medieval landscape of villages whose relational production in the land of Bambuk remains poorly known.
Chapter 10
Assembling the Medieval Village [+–] 253-277
This chapter draws on a relational perspective to recount a history of multiscalar interaction at Diouboye over three phases of occupation during the early-2nd millennium. The political strategies of houses at the microscale—some more network, some more corporate—entangled them in mesoscale and macroscale relations extending outwards to neighboring settlements, imperial polities, and long-distance trade networks that made up the medieval mosaic of the Western Sudan.
Chapter 11
Globalized Communities: Perspectives from Prehistory [+–] 278-287
This chapter concludes the book by reflecting on the contributions of a relational archaeology to understanding two wider anthropological issues relevant to the comparative analysis of past village communities—namely, geographies of power and histories of globalization
End Matter
References [+–] 288-311
The land of Bambuk was an important source of gold for trans-Saharan trade and the imperial polities of Ghana and Mali, yet the non-centralized societies of this region remain largely peripheral in the historiography of West Africa. Drawing on recent archaeological research at the site of Diouboye in eastern Senegal, this book explores social life in medieval Bambuk from the standpoint of a village occupied over several centuries (1000-1400 CE). Material and spatial data from excavations, together with those from survey of the middle Falemme River basin, enable a critical look at how interactions across multiple scales—among neighboring houses, between cultural and craft traditions, and within a much broader political economy—created both possibilities for and challenges to the ongoing production of a local community at Diouboye. By moving back and forth across these scales centered on a single village, Assembling the Village in Medieval Bambuk outlines a relational archaeology of community applicable to the study of seemingly peripheral societies and processes of pre-modern globalization across Africa and beyond.
Index [+–] 312-318
The land of Bambuk was an important source of gold for trans-Saharan trade and the imperial polities of Ghana and Mali, yet the non-centralized societies of this region remain largely peripheral in the historiography of West Africa. Drawing on recent archaeological research at the site of Diouboye in eastern Senegal, this book explores social life in medieval Bambuk from the standpoint of a village occupied over several centuries (1000-1400 CE). Material and spatial data from excavations, together with those from survey of the middle Falemme River basin, enable a critical look at how interactions across multiple scales—among neighboring houses, between cultural and craft traditions, and within a much broader political economy—created both possibilities for and challenges to the ongoing production of a local community at Diouboye. By moving back and forth across these scales centered on a single village, Assembling the Village in Medieval Bambuk outlines a relational archaeology of community applicable to the study of seemingly peripheral societies and processes of pre-modern globalization across Africa and beyond.
Antiquity
