Von Perlen, Rost und Meeresschnecken: Drehscheibe Sahel.

Von Perlen, Rost und Meeresschnecken: Drehscheibe Sahel

Senckenberg Naturmuseum, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

September 8, 2007-October 28, 2007

Musee National de Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

March 15, 2008-December 10, 2008

It is not only those great, spectacular exhibitions about the art and culture of African peoples that merit the attention of public and experts. Often it is precisely the small exhibitions, organized with much commitment and love of detail, that attract the attention they deserve. Especially if it is the work of colleagues from the important discipline of African archaeology, of which anthropologists and historians at least in Germany are still hardly aware. The exhibition 'Won Perlen, Rost und Meeresschnecken: Drehscheibe Sahel" ("Of Beads, Rust, and Sea Snails. The Sahel as a Fulcrum"), shown at the Senckenberg Museum of Natural History in Frankfurt am Main, was such an exhibition. It came out of a large academic project financed by the German Research Foundation from 1988-2002, in which representatives of disciplines as diverse as archaeology, botany, anthropology, geography, and linguistics collaborated on a common research topic (the interaction between man and environment in the West African savanna) in several West African countries and in Frankfurt.

The exhibition "Drehscheibe Sahel"--about 200 mostly small-sized exhibits within a space of 100 square meters--brings the archaeological analysis of material finds from Burkina Faso to an end (Fig. l). The curator of the exhibition, Sonja Magnavita, carried out excavations from 1996-2001 on an Iron Age site named Kissi. It was a happy coincidence that drew Magnavita's attention to the archaeological site: while inspecting the terrain, she bumped her feet against a bracelet and thus started these important excavations in association with the study-group directed by Professor Peter Breunig of Frankfurt University.

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Kissi, with a documented record of settlement between the late first millennium BC and the thirteenth century AD, is situated near a rainwater depression (mare) bearing the same name, between the dunes of the thornbush savannah in the extreme northeast of Burkina Faso. The analysis of the material finds has made available a wealth of information about a decisive epoch in the history of Africa and one of its key regions, the Sahel. This concept is derived from the Arabic sahil, which means coast or shore. The early Arabian travellers described the region as the salvaging "shore" at the southern rim of the "sandy sea" of the Sahara. Authors from antiquity, such as Herodotus (fifth century BC) and Pliny the Elder (first century AD), provided information about Africa, but they did not say anything about any direct trade between North and West Africa. An extensive caravan trade became possible only after the use of the domesticated dromedary spread throughout the Sahara in the first centuries AD (finds of dromedary bones in the Senegal date back to the third and fourth centuries ADJ. Beginning around the eighth century AD, Arabic sources give instances of a vibrant direct trade in gold, ivory, slaves, and other goods. But how had the trans-Saharan trade actually been organized in pre-Arabic times? Taking the exhibition "Beads, Rust and Sea Snails" as a paradigmatic case, the agenda was to represent the Sahel and the trade taking place within it from the point of view of early history.

Presumably, it was the inhabitants of the Sahara themselves who organized the exchange of goods between North and West Africa. Thus, luxury goods such as jewelry, glass, copper, and cloth reached the sub-Saharan area probably in exchange for foodstuffs. The main driving force in this trade must have been salt, which is amply encountered in the Sahara but sparsely extant in the Sahel. Kissi came to be settled in the last centuries BC, after the end of the Stone Age (around 1000 BC). The excavations show that in addition to living spaces, there were extensive cemeteries. In the case of burials there did not exist great differences in the mode of interment: the dead were mostly buried with the head toward the West and the eyes directed toward the South, and sometimes two or more skeletons could be found in a grave (Fig. 2). Houses have not been preserved because buildings were constructed of unburned clay.

One point in the exhibition draws the visitor's attention to the importance of the processing of iron in Kissi. Finds of iron slag testify to the presence of smiths and to the processing and smelting of metals on that spot (Fig. 3). According to these and other pieces of archaeological evidence, it must be assumed that iron techniques were invented at independent centers--independent of the classical locus of the earliest traces of iron production, the Hittite Empire in Anatolia dating to the early second millennium BC. Even since the first millennium BC, people were able to produce hard tool steel with the aid of clay furnaces and charcoal fuel. Besides many object finds made of iron--among which are daggers with curved blades and two swords with wooden hilts and scabbards dated back to the fifth-seventh centuries AD (Fig. 4)--the visitor may admire ceramic sherds, some of which show ornamentations produced by a braided mat, a technique still used by the Dogon of Mall for constructing vessels. In the context of clay processing, special attention is paid to a small terracotta figurine (Fig. 5). The torso attains a height of only about 13cm (5"), while its narrowest passage on the body measures about 2.5cm (1"). It shows ornamentations that emphasize the navel as the center of the body and are suggestive of button-like scarifications.

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Even textile finds appear in the exhibition. In West Africa, archaeological textile finds are extremely rare. In Kissi, the wealth of metal objects deposited in the tombs has generated an environment conducive to the preservation of textile remnants directly attached to the metal. The oldest ones date from the first half of the first millennium AD and are therefore clearly older than most known textile finds from south of the Sahara. Although the fragments are not large enough to determine whether they were pieces of cloth or blankets, it is at least clear that the raw material was wool.

Among other spectacular finds, there is jewelry such as rings, bracelets, and anklets, predominantly made of iron, but also of copper and copper alloys--evidently because they conferred higher prestige. Some of the copper objects are probably of North African provenance. Not least, the exhibition offers a wealth of beads in the most diverse forms and colors--more than 5000 were recovered at Kissi, mostly from tombs (Fig. 6). The majority, though, do not originate in the surrounding area at all, but are from different regions. They were produced of glass, stone, clay, iron, ostrich egg-shell, or bone. The more valuable stone, iron, and glass beads were more likely to be found in the tombs, the clay and bone beads more likely in the settlement. An analysis of the glass beads revealed that many beads from Kissi have a composition corresponding to that of Near Eastern glass of the first millennium AD.

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Finds of glass beads from the archaeological site of Igbo Ukwu, located further downstream in southern Nigeria, also point in the same direction--and thus offer evidence for far-reaching trade connections between West Africa and the Near East. The Niger probably served as an axis along which trading goods were transported and exchanged. And last but not least, specimens were found in Kissi of another form of other goods that is still especially valued in many African societies because of its centrality in the most diverse ritual and profane contexts: cowries. Although there is only a small quantity in Kissi, it is of great importance and counts among the most unambiguous clues to far-reaching trade contacts between the West African Sahel and the wider world. As far as the cowries found in two tombs at Kissi are concerned, they are of a species, Cypraea moneta, that is not indigenous to the West African coast but to an area between the Red Sea and the Pacific. They have their widest distribution in the Indian Ocean and in historical times reached Africa primarily by way of the Maldive Islands. The cowries in the tombs at Kissi are the oldest finds of this kind encountered in Western Africa, and date from an epoch when Arabic-Islamic trade did not yet exist.

The exhibition in Frankfurt shows in a compact and focussed way that Kissi, in the north of Burkina Faso, is an archaeological site that transcends its local context. Thanks to the people of Kissi and their pleasure in jewelry and their devotion to the burial of the dead, research has come to the conclusion that, centuries before the Arabic-Islamic conquest of North Africa, there were trade connections across the Sahara that extended to the Near East as well as to the Indian Ocean.

How the inhabitants of Kissi paid for their goods from long-distance trade is an open question, as uncertain as any sound statements that could be made about their social and political organization. The exhibition graphically reveals that it must have been a sedentary, structured society based on the division of labor. As far as the tomb finds are concerned, it has to be assumed that the so-called trans-Saharan trade--often considered decisive for the making of far-reaching trade networks within West Africa--is to be seen as, at best, an extension of already extant long-distance trade systems. In this context, the Niger must have played a central role as a trade axis. More than 600 years after the end of permanent settlement in Kissi, the excavations conducted there have offered insight into the great variety of human life in those times and in that place--giving rise to a host of new issues that need to be answered by future intensive research.

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As the exhibition is a bi-national initiative shared between Burkina Faso and Germany, following the Frankfurt presentation, it moved to the Musee National in Ouagadougou. Moreover, in March 2008, a conference about the cultural and technological changes in the first millennia BC and AD took place there (the proceedings of which will be published in 2009). Two factors, above all, are worth mentioning: It is not yet a matter of course that exhibition projects and the corresponding conferences concerning Africa put up in the Western world find their way to the continent itself. In view of more "cooperation" and less "talk about each other" associated with exhibition activities, and especially in view of the archaeological treasures of Africa such an approach should be most welcome and supported.

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References cited

Magnavita, Sonja. 2003. "The Beads of Kissi, Burkina Faso." Journal of African Archaeology a (1):127-138.

--, M. Hallier, C. Pelzer, C., S. Kahlheber, and V. Linseele. 2002. "Nobles, Guerriers, Paysans. Une necropole de l'Age de fer et son emplacement dans l'Oudalan pre- et protohistorique" Beitrage zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Archaologie 22:21-64.

--. 2002. "Das Grab des Kriegers" In Leben in Westafrika, ed. Andrea Reikat, pp. 44-49. Frankfurt am Main: Plexus-Verlag.

--. 200l. "A Ceramic Figurine from Kissi, Burkina Faso." Sahara 13:128 129.

CHRISTINE STELZIG is deputy director and curator of the Africa department at the Museum der Weltkulturen in Frankfurt am Main. She is currently collaborating on a catalogue of the Museum's masterpieces from Africa, the Americas, Oceania, and Southeast-Asia. christine.stelzig@ stadt-frankfurt.de