With National Science Foundation support, Dr. François Richard and an international team of researchers will conduct two field seasons of excavations in the province of Siin (Senegal) between January 2013 and July 2014. The project is a collaborative effort combining U.S. and Senegalese archaeologists to examine the centuries immediately preceding and following the advent of Atlantic contacts in Senegal in 1444. The Atlantic era is one of the most intensely researched stretches of human history and a defining moment in Africa's past, yet it is also a relatively poorly understood period. The "transitional period" (AD 1300-1700) connecting Iron Age societies to the early centuries of global encounters is particularly obscure in West Africa. This is in part because knowledge of the period rests on a small corpus of testimonies left by European navigators, which offer a limited purview of African societies at the time of contact and say little about them before that. Archaeology can redress these difficulties, by offering empirical glimpses of the African past before the advent of documented history and generating independent evidence to complement historical records during the Atlantic era. When confronted with other sources, archaeological datasets can point to gaps or inconsistencies in historical understanding, and craft a richer portrayal of African experience.
The Siin provides a compelling point of entry into questions of historical transitions in Senegambia, the area of Africa with the longest record of contacts with Europe. Between 1300-1700, the region witnessed momentous events, involving massive population migrations, the development of a centralized kingdom, and the incorporation of the region into global circuits of exchange. Despite its small size, the Siin polity was deeply implicated in the historical processes that fashioned the Senegambian past, and its turbulent history is poised to cast critical light on the political, economic, and cultural transformations that accompanied African communities' transitions into the Atlantic era. This history has left significant material traces in the form of ancient villages and other vestiges of past social life, which are readily amenable to archaeological analysis.
To investigate the question of Atlantic transitions in Siin, the research team will gather archaeological information about the ways in which village communities negotiated transformations in regional economies. This will be implemented through large-scale excavations at two sites, Diohine (S260) located in the hinterland and Mbissel (S106) situated on the coast. These two sites were selected on the basis of initial archaeological testing, which revealed well-preserved village remains, with multiple occupations spanning the period of interest. Excavations will focus on exposing broad horizontal surfaces to reveal relations between different components of the sites. Particular attention will be given to residential contexts, trash middens, and activity areas. The goals for this phase of the project are to get a better understanding of six dimensions of village experience during the "transitional period": 1) Occupation histories and social space, 2) trade, 3) domestic and craft production, 4) consumption practices, 5) technology, and 6) ritual life. Collected artifacts (local ceramics, tobacco pipes, metal objects, stone tools, beads, imported goods), their contexts of recovery, and changing distributions over time and space will help to address these multiple questions. Specialized compositional analysis of ceramics will provide additional information about the source of pottery and its circulation. A pilot program to test the feasibility of soil chemistry data will be implimented. Collectively, these different strands of evidence will provide invaluable data on village life in Siin, given the complete absence of thorough, long-term, extensive excavation programs in the region. They will enable the compilation of village profile in the area between AD 1300 and 1700, and permit an investigation of rural trajectories in times of global entanglements. As currently planned, the first phase of the project will begin in January 2013 and consist of excavations at Diohine. The second phase will take place the following year, and move the seat of excavations to Mbissel. In both contexts, excavations will be complemented by extensive mapping within the sites' immediate peripheries. This work, which is designed to situate occupation histories in broader spatial context, will expand previous mapping and survey work conducted at the sites.
With regard to broader impacts, the study will foster new understanding about an obscure yet foundational period of African history, which has never been the object of systematic investigations in Senegal. This, in turn, will provide the basis for major revisions in historical portrayals of Senegal and Atlantic Africa, and key contributions to scholarly research on indigenous people's long-term engagement with global economic expansion. The project will also be a forum for cross-cultural collaboration and learning between Senegalese, European, and American students and professionals, and consultation with the rural communities of Siin about their past. In addition to the published materials that will come out of this research, we will also disseminate results to broader publics, and plan on staging an exhibit at the National Art Museum in Dakar.
