Archaeology of West Africa

West Africa is a vast geographic region that in archaeological terms is usually circumscribed by the Tropic of Cancer in the north, Cameroon in the east, and the Atlantic Ocean in the west and south. It encompasses a great deal of variation and diversity on environmental, linguistic, cultural, and political fronts. One of its defining features is the parallel environmental zones that run east to west so that as the traveler moves south to north, they pass through coastal, forest, savanna (wooded and grassland), and Sahelian zones until they reach the Sahara in the north. The region’s modern-day political borders created by European colonialist competition cut through existing ethnolinguistic groups and erstwhile kingdoms and states. Politically, during the last 2,000 years West African societies ranged in scale from decentralized agricultural societies to mobile pastoralists to state-level societies and empires. As is to be expected, West African archaeology reflects this complexity. It is for this reason that, rather than reducing it to an “ages and stages” formulation, most West African(ist) archaeologists speak about the material record as a “mosaic” which varied over time and space. In comparison to the rest of the continent, very little is known about the very early period of human history, with scant evidence for settlement during the Early and Middle Stone Age periods. The region’s past is better known from about midway through the Holocene (Later Stone Age), 6,000 bce. This is also coincident with wide-ranging transformations in the lifestyles of hunter-gatherers in the region, as this is when the transition to food production occurs, first with pastoralism and later with crop cultivation. Iron technology was introduced in the 1st millennium bce, and the rise of complex societies with their accompanying institutions occurred in the 1st millennium ce. Any discussion of the literature will be partial, but this is exacerbated by the patchy archaeological coverage of the region. This is for a number of reasons: the size of the area to be covered, the variable history of archaeological research in different parts, the difficulty of working in some ecological settings such as the forest zone, conflict-ridden zones that make it unsafe to conduct research, and difficulties in African scholars accessing resources and funding. Despite this, considerable progress in our knowledge of the region has been made.