“Finding West Africa’s Oldest City” by Susan and Roderick McIntosh
Two cities lie as neighbors on a stark river plain of West Africa. One stirs with the vigor of 10,000 inhabitants. The other, now lifeless, a thousand years ago held as many people, perhaps more. Three kilometers separate modern Jenne, busy with marketing and trade, from the ghost town Jenne-jeno-“ancient Jenne.” Both sprawl across flats where the Bani and Niger Rivers weave braided courses in the Inland Delta region of the Republic of Mali.
In the scorched bleakness of the Sahel belt of West Africa, Jenne-jeno is a great wonder—and a paradox. From a start in the third century B.C., the city by A.D. 800 had grown to support many thousands. Mysteriously abandoned 600 years ago, Jenne-jeno lay forgotten for centuries. Today a few acacia trees and a clump or two of mangoes dot the barren ancient site, a vast teardrop-shaped mound that rises to a height of seven meters (23 feet)-beyond reach of annual floods-and measures two kilometers (1.2 miles) around its perimeter. Composed entirely of the debris of human occupation, this tell is a maze of eroded house walls, the surface littered with potsherds, glass beads, fragments of stone bracelets, and bits of corroded metal.
During two field seasons, in 1977 and 1981, my husband and I probed at the skeleton of Jenne-jeno. Its old bones, in the outcome, yielded evidence that here 10,000 or more inhabitants fashioned an advanced society vibrant with elegant craftsmanship, productive agriculture, and far reaching trade. It is the oldest known city, and perhaps the most important Iron Age site, in Africa south of the Sahara.
We came upon Jenne-jeno almost accidentally. In 1975, Rod and I, then graduate students in archaeology had driven across West Africa from Senegal to Ghana to check out locations for future research. After days of travel over Mali’s dry savannas, we entered a floodplain alive with cattle, carpeted with grasses, and studded with man-made earth mounds that ignited our curiosity.
We stopped in the busy city of Jenne, intending to explore nearby sites the next day. Unfortunately, Rod was struck by virulent bacillary dysentery. We fled Jenne seeking a doctor, unaware that we had passed almost within sight of Jenne-jeno.
Our actual “discovery” of Jenne-jeno came months later as we pored over aerial photographs bought from the Mali government. A huge tell three kilometers southeast of Jenne, in an area almost as large as the modern town, riveted our attention. We counted 65 smaller mounds in a four-kilometer radius. Rod and I succumbed to the challenge of Jenne-jeno, and on January 30, 1977, we walked for the first time across the site. Flanked by friends from the Ministry of Culture of Mali, we gazed awestruck at what we saw. The dense brown clay was strewn with artifacts. We counted scores of mud-brick house foundations and spotted the truncated remains of a massive city wall. Clearly, thousands of people once lived here, but how long ago?
“It’s a bewildering site, and we’re starting from scratch,” Rod said to me and our crew of local helpers. “We’ve got four months before the rains to learn as much as we can.”
Our luck far exceeded expectations. Each of the four pits we dug yielded abundant evidence of how inhabitants had lived and of the chronology of the community. Animal bones, rice chaff, and carbonized grains documented a mixed diet. Pottery fragments, spindle whorls, terra-cotta statuary, and crucibles for smelting copper or gold gave insight into local arts and crafts. Walls defined sturdy homes; hearths located cooking areas.
But most important of all was the radio-carbon dating from hearth charcoal proving that Jenne-jeno already had been occupied for 1,600 years when, about 1400, it was finally abandoned-not much after the time most scholars believe Jenne was founded.
Our discovery excited archaeologists and historians. It contradicted earlier assumptions that urbanism was introduced into West Africa only after North African Arabs penetrated the Sahara in the ninth century to control long distance trade. Catalyzed by expanded trade, cities grew, first in the southern Sahara, centuries later farther south. By this reasoning, Jenne-jeno should have developed in the 13th century. What then were we to make of our radiocarbon dates testifying that Jenne-jeno existed 1500 years earlier?
The evidence suggested an impressive buildup of population in and around the ancient city throughout the first millennium. When and why did Jenne-jeno begin to grow? What occupied all those people? What was so attractive about the location the city held in orbit so many satellite communities? Only further excavation could provide the answers. By 1980, we both were members of the anthropology faculty at Rice University in Houston, an institution with strong resources to back us. Then, too, our 1977 findings won interested attention from scholars in Europe, Africa and the United States. As a result, for our second field season we gained additional support from the national Science Foundation and also benefited from cooperation and logistic backing by Mali’s Institute of Human Sciences.
With three graduate students as assistants, we arrived in modern day Jenne on New Year’s Day 1981, exhausted from dusty two-day road trip from the capital, Bamako, which we had reached by air. Dozens of children surrounded the taxi demanding candy, ballpoint pens, and Malian ten franc coins (worth about two U.S. cents).
Nothing had changed. Jenne was still without electricity and running water. Bleating sheep and goats still scuttled through the narrow alleys. Street vendors dozed under grass-mat shelters in the noon day sun. Very much a traditional African town, Jenne displays handsome geometric mud-brick architecture that—fortunately in our view—overshadows the few colonial style concrete buildings with metal roofs. To work at Jenne-jeno, we would have to commute daily from Jenne, where we rented the second floor of a mud-brick house owned by a local merchant, Baba Traore. His neighbors called him “Little Baba.” Baba’s brother, Dani, and his family occupied the ground floor. Stairs ascending in tight angles led from our apartment to the roof, where we spread out artifacts for study and where we slept in the summer heat. Diggers were easy to find; many men were in town seeking work during the dry season, slack for agriculture, from January through April. There were the usual rumors, of course, that we would be digging up treasure from old tombs. But most applicants were earnest men with no thought of booty.
On January 4th we jounced out to the site in a springless donkey cart. As we creaked over the lumpy flood plain, we clung white-knuckled to the sideboards and gave up trying to talk through rattling teeth. We began in the central part of the mound, the men digging with short handled agricultural hoes made in Jenne. Many mud-brick house foundations were visible. Domestic structures were a priority. They told us how people lived–what they ate, the tools they used, the jewelry they wore.
As we peeled back a meter of deposits in the first pit, seven wall footings appeared. In this well-to-do section of town, families lived in roomy, rectangular houses built of round mud bricks like residences in Jenne today. Ladies of the house wore jewelry and hair ornaments fashioned by craftsmen from materials, such as copper and semiprecious stones, that could only have come from distant sources. Iron and stone bracelets came to light, and iron and copper rings. Bones, grain remnants, even the kind of utensils showed that everyone in this part of town dined cutririously on catfish, perch, rice, beef, and presumably milk.
Using pottery styles as dating benchmarks, cross-checked by radiocarbon analysis, we determined that all this was going on at Jenne-jeno from A.D. 1000-1200.
A month of hard labor—and we had only reached a depth of one meter in the large central pit, which we called LX for Large exposure. Other pits bore designations such as WFL, waterfront location; NWS, north wall section; and ALS, Adria’s last stand, where student Adria LaViolette did excellent digging in the horizon of A.D. 800-1000.
Soil Deposits Pose a Riddle
Puzzlingly, the soil began to change character. In the southern half of the LX pit we traced several large holes filled with broken pottery and bones. Were these originally storage pits, or graves, or rubbish dumps?
Just north of the holes we uncovered three basin-shaped areas of fire-reddened clay filled with ash. Adria, supervising work in the pit, shared with us her uncertainty.
“I can’t figure out how all these things fit together,” she said. “There are those odd burned-clay concavities; in the rest of the pit the deposits are very hard in some spots and soft in others. It just doesn’t make sense.”
Trowel in hand, I began probing the troubling deposits. Finding a spot where hard compact earth had soft material beside it, I inched along on hand and knees, tracing the interface. The line of compact deposits lengthened into an arc. Suddenly the picture snapped into focus. We had delineated the foundation of a round-house—an entire round house! The three enigmatic baked-clay structures at once made sense as cooking hearths outside the house. The pits to the south were garbage dumps.
At least some were. Two turned out to be graves containing deeply buried urns. These shapely orange-red vessels, some a meter high, came to light all over the mound in cemetery areas and within or beside houses. We excavated about two dozen of them, many still intact. Many, many more were (and still are), visible, eroding out of the surface of the site.
We found bones in all the urns; the dead had been interred doubled up in the fetal position. Put in place over a span of more than a thousand years, A.D. 300-1400, the big pots often were crushed by later burials superimposed at the same spots.
Here again, continuity linked the old and new Jennes: The custom of urn burial is practiced today among the Bobos and other Malian tribes not converted to Islam. Painstaking work revealed, brick by brick, the entire round-house foundation. Then a shout rose from the workmen. A patch of deep orange terra-cotta shone against the light gray bricks. In minutes, we uncovered the headless torsos of a pair of terra-cotta statuettes. Male and female, side by side, they had been set into a niche within the house wall. The heads had been broken off and lost, doubtless sometime when the figures had been exposed at ground level.
Their shrine-like positioning cast a light on three similar statuettes we had discovered in 1977. All were in a kneeling posture, with short skirts or loincloths; all had been set into a wall or placed under the floor. Why had the people thought it important to incorporate them into their house structures?
Again, modern Jenne provided a parallel. In the early 1900’s a colonial administrator noted that many entryways in Jenne houses had a small altar, a platform supporting a statuette in the likeness of a revered ancestor. At the shrine, sacrifices could be made to the deceased. We think it is possible to trace this custom of ancestor worship back a thousand years to Jenne-jeno. The kneeling statuettes from the ancient city may well represent protective ancestral spirits once invoked by its inhabitants.
Word spread rapidly of the round-house discovery. Mr. Be Sao, chief mason of Jenne, bicycled out to the site. He pronounced the structure a female residence; the attached cooking ovens left no doubt. Mr. Sao pointed out that such houses still can be found in rural Mali. Mud walls that we found reaching out from opposite sides of the round-house, he confidently informed us, would have joined the house with others arranged roughly in a circle to form a family compound, sheltering separately two or more wives and the man who was husband of all. Other compounds crowded close.
Mr. Sao’s analysis was persuasive. As he talked and gestured, Jenne-jeno of A.D. 800 came alive for us. His words evoked narrow alleys, barely wide enough for a donkey or a woman bearing on her head a day’s wood supply, twisting among the compounds.
By late February, Jenne-jeno had heated up at noonday to 43 degrees Celsius (110 degrees Fahrenheit). The harmattan, a desiccating wind from the Sahara, swept across the floodplain daily. The relentless pummeling frayed everyone’s nerves. Gusts swirled into the pits, flinging loose dirt in our faces. The suggestion of our Fulani friend Hama Bocoum, we quickly adopted the headgear of the local herders of his tribe-three meters of cotton cloth wrapped several times around the head, nose, and mouth. Unavoidably, the eyes still suffered.
Jenne-jeno kept on yielding quantities of artifacts and data. Rich finds included iron spears and harpoons, and ceramic cows and sheep that were children’s toys. It took Rod and me and our three assistants more than four hours every afternoon to number and catalog everything found earlier in the day. Most tedious was describing and analyzing the more than 100,000 pottery shards. Properly studied, pottery can elucidate the advancement and social organization of its makers as well as furnish chronology.
Pottery Dates Advance New Ideas
One March afternoon I studied some pottery brought in the day before. On a table I laid out several large pieces of exquisitely made pottery with geometric designs painted in white over a glowing deep red slip.
“We just got these out of the LX pit,” I said to Rod. “Our 1977 pottery data, you remember, and the radiocarbon dates told us that white-on-red pottery like this was made between A.D. 400 and 800. Well, I’ve been examining the pottery from our other five pits. They all produced this pottery.”
Rod’s interest sharpened. “But those pits are scattered all over Jenne-jeno,” he said, “two of them at the edge of the mound. We have to walk nearly a kilometer just to get from one pit to another. Are you saying that the mound, all 80 acres of it, was already in existence 1,500 years ago?”
“The dating of the pottery shows there’s no doubt,” I responded.
Both of us exulted over this solid evidence that Jenne-jeno had expanded much farther at an earlier fate than had seems possible. It was, perhaps, our biggest discovery there.
The evidence was unequivocal: Jenne-jeno was a major settlement several centuries before the Arabs first established trading posts in the Sahara. But could we really call the site, no matter how large it was, a true city at that time?
Various lines of evidence suggest that we can. Within days after we discovered the pottery tie-in, a new trench dug through the mud-brick foundation of the massive city wall began producing early white-on-red pottery. Although centuries of erosion have leveled this once formidable wall, three-meter-wide sections of it can be traced over almost the whole two-kilometer perimeter of the site. Erecting it was a major public-works project, the kind that we expect urban populations to undertake. And it was built at Jenne-jeno sometime between A.D. 400 and 800.
City Prospers on Trade
At the height of development Jenne-jeno and its nearby satellites may have had close to 20,000 people. This large population was served by specialists, including well-trained potters to judge from ceramic quality. And we found the remains of copper- and iron-working ateliers, even though neither copper nor iron ore is found more than 50 kilometers away. All accessible sources of copper are in the Sahara, 1,000 kilometers distant. Sandstone slabs and cylinders, used as grinding stones, some 100 kilometers from the north.
Who organized the trade that brought these materials to Jenne-jeno in the fifth century? Certainly not the Arabs, since they didn’t appear on the scene for at least another 400 years.
No evidence has turned up of a foreign hand directing the early Saharan commerce that nourished Jenne-jeno. No Roman or Byzantine or Egyptian imports have been unearthed on the site. The trade in the mid-first millennium seems to have been indigenous—initiated and developed by Africans.
Seemingly, the inhabitants of Jenne-jeno were always traders, even when they settled the site around 250 B.C. They had to barter for two vital materials that the floodplain lacked—iron and stone. From such humble origins, we believe, commerce gradually expanded to tap Saharan copper and salt.
What did Jenne-jeno offer in exchange to tempt desert nomads to mine for copper and the quarry salt? Archaeological evidence gives no clear answer. But the trading activities of present-day Jenne provide clues to Jenne-jeno’s economic past.
For 600 years Jenne’s major export has been food. This land owes its richness to the annual silt-bearing flood of the Niger. Huge surpluses of rice and other crops can be grown. The nearby river offers endless fish—Nile perch and several kinds of catfish. What could be more appealing to a desert dweller than a reliable supply of food?
For six centuries Jenne has traded down-river with Timbuktu, providing the fabled desert city with food in exchange for salt, copper, and many other goods from the north. In 1830, Rene Caillie, one of the first Europeans to reach Timbuktu, wrote that it “possesses no other resources but its trade in salt….The inhabitants procure from Jenne everything requisite for the supply of their wants.”
The Monday market in Jenne still packs people into a public square as big as a football field. Many spend a whole day getting there: Some come by foot or donkey cart, others by river in flat-bottomed canoes—piogues—the same kind that have long traded between Jenne and Timbuktu.
Many of the items bought and sold, we saw, have not changed in that time. In one corner a merchant hammers at grey-white slabs of slat from Saharan quaries. An old man in a flowing jallaba offers dates from Algerian oases. Throngs of people buy and sell local produce—bushels of red African rice, baskets of blackened smoked fish, small mountains of chili peppers and onions.
Islamic Jenne prospered from its luxury trade in salt and gold. In 1655, Al-Sadi, a native of Timbuktu and an imam of Jenne’s mosque, described Jenne as “one of the great markets of the Muslim world. There the salt merchants of Taghaza [in the Sahara] meet merchants carrying gold from the mines of Bitou [to the south]. Because of this blessed
city, caravans flock to Timbuktu from all points of the horizon.” Even in the 19th century, Jenne was known as the Land of Gold, because so much of the long-distance gold trade passed through it. This raised the question in our minds whether gold had been traded at Jenne-jeno a thousand years or earlier. Pre-Arab participation in the gold trade would help account for the city’s rapid growth.
Would any gold come to light at Jenne-jeno? The days passed and the excavation entered its fourth and last month. Then…
Rod was working near the southern edge of the mound when one of our Malian crew handed him a note. Charlie McNutt, the supervisor of the city-wall excavation had written one electrifying word: “Gold.” Rod grabbed his camera and sped across the site.
“What have you got, Charlie?” Rod asked, peering into the excavation.
“Sidi here was straightening up the trench walls when his hoe blade caught something. Turned out to be this piece of gold jewelry. The workers say it’s an earring.” Charlie held out the prize with elaborate casualness.
It was a stunning piece of craftsmanship. Two delicately curved arms ending in tiny spirals of gold wire. The surface glowed. We discovered later that not even the best goldsmiths in Bamako could precisely duplicate its gleaming mat finish.
Charlie pointed to a little hollow, directly beneath the city wall, from which the treasure had been wrested.
“Then it came from these deposits under the city wall,” Rod mused aloud. “That’s perfect, absolutely perfect! It means that gold was reaching Jenne-jeno even before the city wall was built.”
The discovery of gold perked us all up. The earring and its implications were discussed endlessly at mealtimes.
“If the gold trade was important enough to link Jenne-jeno with mines 800 kilometers south,” asked site supervisor Karol Stoker one evening, “why isn’t there more of it?”
“There probably is more gold,” I said, “a lot of it. But look how huge this site is and how small and scattered our six pits are.”
I compared Jenne-jeno to a big jar filled with hundreds of mixed cookies. If someone reached in for a favorite kind-say chocolate chip-and there were only a few of them in the jar, he might have to pull out a lot of cookies before getting a chocolate chip.
Rains and Excavation Season
In mid-April, clouds gathered over Jenne-jeno. Within three weeks the rains would drive blinding sheets across the site, carving jagged gullies. Before then we had to complete our excavations and backfill the pits.
Almost five meters down in the LX pit, we at last turned up pottery made by the first settlers at Jenne-jeno. It was beautiful, thin-walled and light. Potters had decorated it by rolling braided twine across the wet clay surface. In today’s Jenne we saw artisans beautifying their pots the same way.
Both in shape and in decoration, this fine ware strongly resembled pottery made between 2000 and 500 B.C. that has been found all over the southern Sahara. Thus we could identify the broad area from which Jenne-jeno attracted its first colonists.
By 250 B.C., when Jenne-Jeno was founded, the Sahara had dried out. Geology and archaeology tell us, however, that before 3000 B.C. the Sahara was well-watered, populated by cattle herders who also hunted and fished in lakes and streams. As the Sahara grew arid, many herders were forced elsewhere to find water for their cattle, and the desert was almost emptied of its population. At some point, herders who had moved south became agriculturists and began using iron. Jenne-jeno was settled late in the course of this slow migration.
Initially, the settlement must have been no more than a tiny cluster of round pole-and-mud huts. Luckily for us, some of theses burned to the ground. This fired the smooth mud plastering, preserving impressions of the underlying pole-and-woven-reed structures. Hundreds of these imprinted fragments of burned clay came to light in the lowest levels of our pits.
The newcomers to Jenne-jeno tended their cattle, planted rice, and fished. Their Iron Age hamlet resembled thousands throughout West Africa.
But as prospering Jenne-jeno grew into a city, a new, more cosmopolitan way of life evolved. Other communities sprang up within walking distance, producing a kind of urban sprawl. Within several centuries of the city’s founding, the power of its wealth and commerce had completely transformed the scope and quality of human life on the Inland Delta floodplain.
Thriving Jenne-Jeno Abandoned
A complex urban life-style flourished at Jenne-jeno for almost a thousand years. The reasons for the gradual population shift after A.D. 1200 to Jenne are unclear. They may relate to the transfer, documented in the city’s oral traditions, of commercial power from pagan merchants’ hands to those of an elite converted to Islam. This new aristocracy perhaps insisted that the new Jenne dissociate itself from the older city’s polytheistic practices.
In the centuries since Jenne-jeno’s abandonment, the dominance of Islam all but erased oral histories relating to the ancient pagan city. Only a few sentences have been handed down that suggest the true relationship of the two great urban centers that have dominated Mali’s Inland Delta floodplain.
The ancestral site lay mute and forgotten-that is, until under our direction 20 men of modern Jenne sank hoes into the earth and uncovered their own past.
Source: McIntosh, Susan and Roderick. “Finding West Africa’s Oldest City.”National Geographic: September 1982, 396-418.
Document 1.1.1