Under the supervision of Dr. Carla M. Sinopoli, Cameron Gokee will analyze archaeological evidence from his 2008-2009 excavations at Diouboye, a middle Iron Age (ca. AD 500-1000) village site located on the Falémé River in eastern Senegal. As the largest settlement in a landscape of smaller hamlets and activity areas, the site of Diouboye included over a dozen discrete areas of architectural remains and artifacts, each representing long-term occupation by one or more household compounds. Surface collections across the entire site and excavations at six occupation areas, and two possible craft production workshops, produced a considerable array of archaeological evidence including the foundations of domestic huts and granaries, hearths, broken pottery for cooking and storage, stone tools for procuring and processing food, animal and plant remains from daily meals and ritual sacrifice, iron and copper tools and ornaments, and rare glass beads and cowry shells from long-distance trade.
By focusing on Diouboye, this research will ultimately contribute to the study of power and authority in societies at all scales by exploring how households, as basic comparative social units, negotiate relations of power through control over the material and social resources at their disposal. Gokee's preliminary analysis of the architecture, pottery, and other craft items suggests that people living in one or two occupation areas at the site partly controlled the production of crafts (metal, pottery, textiles), and possibly trade. Using the remaining archaeological data (animal bones, charred plant remains, and stone tools/debris) to compare patterns of resource production and consumption between excavated compounds, Gokee will determine how households in the village negotiated control over local sources of power such as cultivable land, livestock, communal labor, and ritual knowledge. Furthermore, radiocarbon dates from the long-term sequence of occupation within each household will permit an interpretation of how these relations of power changed, or stayed the same, over several centuries.
Beyond providing new insights into prehistoric village life in West Africa and addressing questions of social scientific import, this project has several broader impacts. First, the study will form the basis for Gokee's doctoral dissertation; subsequent publications in both English and French will cultivate academic collaborations among archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians in West Africa and North America. This dissemination of the research findings through conference papers and publications will further highlight the value of an anthropological approach to archaeological inquiry in West Africa. Second, the identification of faunal remains will create an invaluable reference collection for further archaeozoological research by archaeologists from Senegal and abroad. Third, this project contributes to a growing emphasis on community engagement, cultural heritage, and resource management in an under-researched area of eastern Senegal through collaboration with several institutions - including the French NGO Tétraktys, the Senegalese Conseil Régional de Tambacounda, and local village communities -to develop strategies for natural and cultural conservation in the central Falémé region.
This archaeological project examined myriad dimensions of social life at Diouboye, an Iron Age village that sat on the periphery of more complex West African states, empires, and trade networks around AD 1000-1400. NSF-funded analyses of stone tools, animal bones, and charred plant remains from this site have yielded new evidence for the ways in which people coordinated their day-to-day economic and political activities, primarily among members of certain extended households. For example, the identification of domestic and wild animal bones across the site indicates that villagers all obtained a similar range of meat from hunting or herding. Cross-household similarities were also identified in stone tool debris, which indicated that every household made use of this fairly expedient technology. These discoveries contrast with other lines of evidence for household specialization in pottery making, metal smithing, and perhaps even trading. With that in mind, these data suggest that leadership at Diouboye was not grounded in strong differences in household wealth, an important conclusion that mirrors interpretations of more complex societies in West Africa during this period. Beyond shedding light on the history of peripheral regions in West Africa prior to the violence of the Atlantic slave trade, this study offers a long-term perspective on the same sorts of processes of globalization and state-led development that continue to affect many rural communities around the world. Today specifically, as the price of gold soars, the gold mining operations of multi-national corporations stand to negatively impact, if not outright destroy, many archaeological resources in eastern Senegal. By highlighting the presence and value of archaeological sites to scholars and present-day communities alike, this research highlights the importance of local cultural heritage and helps to ensure that ongoing economic development projects work with local people to document heritage sites as valuable, non-renewable resources. Over the past three years, this project has also contributed to American-Senegalese scientific collaboration, by providing field and laboratory experiences for several Senegalese graduate students. In particular, the success of these NSF-funded analyses for generating meaningful interpretations of ancient sites has demonstrated the value of a scientific approach to archaeology in Senegal. Since the study of animal and plant remains has not been well-developed, the identified and labeled plant and animal remains from Diouboye will form the basis for a comparative collection that scholars can use to identify unknown specimens. Alongside the eventual publication of data from Diouboye, these collections may inspire the next generation of Senegalese archaeologists to pursue these sorts of analyses in their own research.
