Unit
Years: 6th – Present
Culture & Community
Economy & Society
Freedom & Equal Rights
Historical Events, Movements, and Figures
Prior knowledge of the role of gold in supporting the economies of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai is crucial which students can read about in the student context of The Gold Road. Additionally, an asset-based orientation to the Sahara as a cultural zone would enhance students’ understanding of the flows of people, goods, and ideas that traveled across it. What does the Sahara as a cultural zone mean? The Sahara is typically taught as a geographical feature and rarely discussed as a vibrant cultural zone. Specific knowledge to further support students in their understanding of the region’s history include::
You may want to consider prior to teaching this lesson: The Gold Road Why There? Historical Geographies of West Africa A Story of Great Cities Memory and Knowledge: The Story of Sundiata Keita
The empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai thrived in West Africa from the 6th to the 16th century because they traded a variety of goods and controlled a key resource- gold. Traders crossed the Sahara to access not only gold but to trade in other resources. It was not just a salt for gold trade. They traded gold, leather goods, kola nuts, camels, pottery, salt, dates, cloth, and many other goods. Traders crossed the Sahara on camel caravans and relied on routes that are called The Gold Road.
The economies of the great empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai were based largely on the control and taxation of goods traded across broad stretches of land, including across the Sahara, with places in North Africa, Europe, the Arabian Peninsula, and Asia. Berstock explains: “Northward, Saharan routes connected to the vast trade networks of the Mediterranean Sea and from there inland across Europe, while eastward they meet the Levantine routes and ultimately the Silk Roads of Central and East Asia” (p.28).
Not surprisingly therefore, but still greatly unknown, there is much evidence that West Africans were globally interconnected since ancient and medieval times. The map of Dulcert in 1339 shows a king at the center of the region of West Africa and the Catalan Atlas of 1375 showcases the king Mansa Musa prominently holding a gold nugget. Next to Mansa Musa on the Catalan Atlas, a trader prominently features on a camel. These maps represent the way West Africa, its kings and resources were imagined in European social circles. The maps also provide evidence of Africa’s prominent place in the global medieval world, as a source of riches, and as a place ruled by powerful kings.
The objects and artifacts from this time can give us insight into what people across the globe sought after, what they needed, what they produced, what they ate, what they used for transportation, how they practiced their religions, what they valued and prized, and what they fought for.
The Trade Route:
The geographies that constrained and enabled this trade are important to know about as a foundation for understanding the Sahara as cultural zone. The Sahara means ocean in Arabic, and the semi-arid belt immediately south of the Sahara is the Sahel, which means shore. Thus, goods were traded “from shore to shore” by people leading camel caravans across the “ocean” that is the Sahara. The gold was located in the Savanna area of Bambuk in modern day Senegal, and Buré, in modern day Guinea, and the Akan region, in modern day Ghana. Gold and other goods were carried on camel caravans which could range from 6 to 2,000 in number on a journey that lasted over two months.
The camel is therefore known as “the ship” of the desert. The camel was introduced to the region from Arabia possibly as early as 100 BCE. Its introduction revolutionized trade, since the camel’s biology made it possible for humans to cross the Sahara with heavy loads. Long eyelashes keep the sand from its eyes; its body temperature and fat storage abilities allow for long periods without water and in extreme heat; its soft and flat hooves can easily walk on the sand and gravel; and its high weight-bearing capacity can carry heavy loads.
According to Howard French, Jenne-Jeno established itself as a key end point in the trade in gold with evidence of this early trade found in the antiquity writings of the Mediterranean. During the Ghana empire, Awdaghost (present day Mauritania), Sijilmasa (present-day Morocco), Jenne-Jeno (present day Mali), and Kumbi-Saleh (present day Mauritania) were key cities in addition to the gold mines of Bambuk (Senegal), Buré (Guinea), and the Akan region (modern Ghana). During the Mali empire, the city of Timbuktu in Mali rose to prominence . The center of the Songhai empire was the city of Gao (present day Mali) further downstream on the Niger River after the bend around Timbuktu. Key stops in the desert were Tadmekka, Arouane, the salt mines of Taghaza, and oases, such as the oasis of Erfoud. The key places to examine throughout time are the southern cities and West Africa and the cities of North Africa, as well as cities in Europe that show the Sahara-Sahel-Savanna as a unit and cultural zone.
Traders:
In the early days of the Ghana empire, West Africans conducted trade with Amazigh Sanhaja (formerly known as Berber, indigenous groups of North Africa), and later after the 8th century, with Arabs who had then colonized the Northern part of Africa. Trade also went beyond North Africa, as far as Europe and what is known in modern times as the Middle East and Asia. Language, religion, culture and trade iteratively supported each other’s development and connections between people and regions.
After the 8th century, trade brought Arabic and Islam to the region. Although the early rulers of the empire of Ghana retained indigenous religions, Ghana partially converted, with evidence of coexistence of Muslims and those practicing ancestral religions in the twin cities of Kumbi-Saleh. The state eventually converted and “by (…)1076–7 Ghana was a Muslim state, lauded for its adherence to Islam” (Gomez, p. 38). Berstock emphasizes that even though Islam was a crucial factor in the trade and linkages with the North, “the medieval Sahara and its hinterlands was profoundly multicultural, with all the diversity of languages, belief systems, lifeways, and perspectives that the word implies today” (p.27). By the time the Mali kingdom rose to power, Islam was widespread.
Objects & Artifacts:
Studying objects of trade (e.g. their materials, the techniques of their making, provenance, movement, and function) reveals West Africa, the Sahara, the Mediterranean world, and even Asia as one unit of interconnected networks. Objects have the capacity to reveal the layers of culture, religion, economics, and knowledge that linked West Africans to people in the Mediterranean, the Arabian Peninsula, and as far as Asia. Archeology has uncovered a vast number of astounding objects and artifacts that speak to the far-reaching connections West Africa had with distant places such as Europe, Arabia, the Levant, and Asia.
In Tadmekka (next to Essouk, Northern Mali), great numbers of ceramic fragments were found in addition to glass beads that came from the Mediterranean region. Howard French reports that glass beads come as far as from Han China dynasty (202 BCE to 220 CE) were found in the old town of Jenne-Jeno. The Block Museum exhibit Caravans of Gold showcased a fragment of Qingbai porcelain found in Tadmekka that also came from China. Another astounding object is a tombstone that was carved in Spain and transported all the way to Gao in Mali. Gold was a central and key sought-after resource and it can be found in the minted coins of Florence and Morocco and in Italian religious gold-leaf paintings. French describes that the first evidence of gold in the region was in Mediterranean writings in the early Christiaan era.
The pivotal role of this resource is clear. “On the basis of this trade, Ghana became known throughout North Africa, Mediterranean Europe, and as far away as Yemen as the “country of gold,” and for cause. In time, it would generate as much as two-thirds of the supply of the metal known to the inhabitants of medieval western Eurasia” (French, p. 42). Salt was also very important and “worth its weight in gold” although it is a mistake to reduce West African trade to a “salt-gold” binary. Kola nuts, ivory, leather goods, pottery, dates, camels were items, among many other items that were traded.
The Existence of Slavery:
Although this lesson focuses on objects, it is important to note that Ghana, Mali, and Songhai’s trade also included a trade of enslaved people toward North Africa. This form of slavery existed but was not based on race, racism and white supremacy the way transatlantic racialized slavery was after 1500. Ancient and medieval slavery in West Africa was primarily intertwined with belief and unbelief in Islam. Gomez explains that domestic slavery changed over time and was the subject of great debates about who could be enslaved.
The markers for who could be enslaved was first and foremost Islamic religious practice, followed by urban dwelling status, literacy, wealth accumulation, and type of clothing. Physical characteristics also mattered although not more than religious faith. Gomez specifies that the association of slavery with blackness was a gradual phenomenon that evolved over time: “some observers were aware that West and North African societies were heterogeneous, that categories of “black” and “white” were simplistic, and were therefore more interested in other distinctions. However, the growth of the trans-Saharan slave trade homogenized and narrowed these perspectives, with those deemed “Sudan” increasingly associated with the servile estate” (p.47).
Badawi, Z. (2020). Desert Empires in the BBC African History Series [Episode 10] Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shEU4PQUxxA&list=PLajyiGz4JeyPq2lpEt2skZRhQsAspIQCp&index=11&t=38s on 12/5/2023
Berzock. K. B. (2019). Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa. Princeton University Press.
Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time. Block Museum of Art “Teachers’ Guide.“ . Northwestern University Retrieved from https://caravansofgold.org/resources/further-resources/ on 9/6/2022.
Conrad, D. (2005) Empires of Medieval West Africa: Ghana, Mali, Songhai. Retrieved from: https://www.sahistory.org.za/sites/default/files/archive-files3/david_c._conrad_empires_of_medieval_west_africabook4me.org_.pdf on 12/5/2023
French, H. W. (2021). Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the making of the modern world, 1471 to the Second World War. New York: Liveright Publishing Company.
Gold Road Lessons: Gold, Goods and Gold Road. Retrieved from https://cfas.howard.edu/gold-road/teaching-resources on 12/5/2023.
Gomez, M. (2018). African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa. Princeton University Press.
Howard University Center for African Studies: The Gold Road Summer Institute for Educators 2020. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EjB6Fy3vj0
Office of Resources for International and Area Studies (ORIAS) How to Read an Object https://orias.berkeley.edu/resources-teachers/how-read-object and 20 Questions to ask an Object).
The Gold Road. Howard University Center for African Studies. Retrieved from http://thegoldroad.org/map.aspx
This lesson brings objects and artifacts of trade to the forefront, allowing “their story” to give us insight into what people sought after, what they needed, what they produced, what they ate, what they used for transportation, how they practiced their religions, what they valued and prized, and what they fought for. Supporting students in engaging in these activities and exploring this new knowledge from an asset-based orientation to the Sahara, as a cultural zone, would enhance students’ understanding of the flows of people, goods, and ideas that traveled across it and avoid a portrayal of the Sahara through the deficit lens of “barren” or “lost which are terms so often used in documentaries and videos about the region”
It is also important to be explicit with students that this story is largely absent in narratives about this timeframe, specifically around the emergence of the Silk Road, even if these processes were historically concurrent. More egregiously, the absence of this story indicates a larger neglect of the centrality of Africa in the global world order during the period of three kingdoms, from approximately 500 to 1500 CE. Designating these trade processes and routes with the label “The Gold Road, a term coined by Brenda Randolph” offers a crucial complement to the widely known “Silk Road” because it centers concurrent processes of movement of peoples and goods in and out of West Africa. All of the core aspects of the history of the Gold Road and the empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai, can be found on an interactive online map called The Gold Road (http://thegoldroad.org/map.aspx#) around which this unit is based.
Finally, an important teaching point to note, as described in the teacher context, is the qualitatively different nature of West African slavery vs. Transatlantic slavery and further, its complexity based on different factors, and its change over time. This form of slavery existed but was not based on race, racism and white supremacy the way transatlantic racialized slavery was in the last 500 years. Ancient and medieval slavery in West Africa was primarily intertwined with belief and unbelief in Islam.
The Gold Road Interactive Map:
The Gold Road is a library of detailed content for independent or scaffolded student inquiry and research. It allows students to explore and make connections in one time period’s people, places, trade items, buildings and routes, or across several time periods. Students can also choose a more focused inquiry on a specific item, a place, or a person and their significance. Thus a student can trace the linkages between people, items, places, routes, and significant buildings or focus on one aspect of this history. A student can make meaning linking micro aspects of this history (e.g. a person or a building) with macro aspects (the role it/they/he/she played in the whole kingdom).
It is strongly recommended that you test out and explore how the map works on your own before launching any activity that uses the map. In this way, you can help answer any technical questions about how to retrieve information and how the layers and markers work before students are tasked with an inquiry.
Detailed instructions and student handouts on How to use The Gold Road map and some of its features are available through the Digital Toolkit. Teachers may modify and adapt these instructions as they introduce the map and activities to students throughout the unit.
As evidence of the past, archeologists excavate objects, plant and animal remains, features, buildings, and sites. Archeologists study objects as historical artifacts that tell part of the story of the past.
The empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai thrived in West Africa from the 6th to the 16th century in large part because they controlled a key resource-gold. From very early on, traders crossed the Sahara with camel caravans to access not only gold but to trade in other resources.
How do we know? Objects of the gold road can tell us a lot about the history of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai, and how they were connected to the rest of the world through trade, and what made them so famous.
They traded across the Sahara. The Sahara means desert in Arabic. Right below (south) of the Sahara is the Sahel. The Sahel means shore in Arabic. Thus, goods were traded “from shore to shore” by people leading camel caravans across the “ocean” that is the Sahara. They did so by using camel caravans (as “ships”) and relying on the network of routes that are called The Gold Road.
Merchants traded not only objects but with their movement, ideas and religions traveled with people, and helped contribute to the spread of Islam to Ghana, Mali and Songhai.
Select the activities and sources you would like to include in the student view and click “Launch Student View.”
It is highly recommended that you review the Teaching Tips and sources before selecting the activities to best meet the needs and readiness of your students. Activities may utilize resources or primary sources that contain historical expressions of racism, outdated language or racial slurs.
Begin the activity by asking students to define an object and an artifact. As needed connect to or provide students with the following definitions:
Show students selected objects or artifacts from your classroom or resources. If items are not available, consider displaying images. Ask students to discuss if they think it is an object or artifact, its use(s) and how it has or will change over time, and how it represents the people who use it. Suggested items/responses could include:
Then challenge students to identify their own object/artifact and share its story. Ask students to identify an object/artifact of their choosing from in the classroom, their backpacks or at home. Ask them to imagine that someone from the future might study it in order to make claims about our culture in our specific place and historical time. Ask them to make a short list of how a future investigator would make claims about their cultural practices based on their artifacts- what would be potential stories told about an artifact? What could they get wrong by just looking at an artifact? What could they get right? How could they arrive at a firm conclusion about the people who interacted with it?
After students are done with their list and discussing how their objects would represent culture and how they could be potentially misinterpreted/misunderstood by outsiders, have them share out with partners or in small groups.
At the conclusion of the activity, explain to students that in this unit, they will have an opportunity to analyze various objects as cultural artifacts. They will identify the provenance, the location found, the materials, where they were sourced, and how they were used as a way to gain insight into West African economic activity, and specifically, trade.
Provide students with the Student Context and time to review it briefly. Then, depending on access to classroom technology, divide students up in order to ensure that each student or group has access to a tablet or computer for this online activity.
If you have not already done so, introduce your students to the Gold Road Map using the detailed instructions and student handouts on How to use The Gold Road available through the Digital Toolkit. Allow students to briefly explore independently or in small groups using and navigating the tools on the site.
In order to complete the map quest:
West African Objects & Artifacts
Vocabulary & Key Terms:
Student Context:
As evidence of the past, archeologists excavate objects, plant and animal remains, features, buildings, and sites. Archeologists study objects as historical artifacts that tell part of the story of the past. The empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai thrived in West Africa from the 6th to the 16th century in large part because they controlled a key resource-gold. From very early on, traders crossed the Sahara with camel caravans to access not only gold but to trade in other resources.
How do we know? Objects of the gold road can tell us a lot about the history of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai, and how they were connected to the rest of the world through trade, and what made them so famous.
They traded across the Sahara. The Sahara means desert in Arabic. Right below (south) of the Sahara is the Sahel. The Sahel means shore in Arabic. Thus, goods were traded “from shore to shore” by people leading camel caravans across the “ocean” that is the Sahara. They did so by using camel caravans (as “ships”) and relying on the network of routes that are called The Gold Road. Merchants traded not only objects but with their movement, ideas and religions traveled with people, and helped contribute to the spread of Islam to Ghana, Mali and Songhai.
Provide students with the Student Context and time to review it briefly if not completed already. Then, depending on access to classroom technology, divide students up in order to ensure that each student or group has access to a tablet or computer for this online activity.
Ask students to choose one trade item from The Gold Road to focus on and ask questions of, as an archeologist would. Objects/artifacts to select from include- Books, animal hides, Gold, leather goods, kola nuts, camels, pottery, salt, dates, cloth, cowrie shells or horses. Students should then:
West African Objects & Artifacts
Vocabulary & Key Terms:
Student Context:
As evidence of the past, archeologists excavate objects, plant and animal remains, features, buildings, and sites. Archeologists study objects as historical artifacts that tell part of the story of the past. The empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai thrived in West Africa from the 6th to the 16th century in large part because they controlled a key resource-gold. From very early on, traders crossed the Sahara with camel caravans to access not only gold but to trade in other resources.
How do we know? Objects of the gold road can tell us a lot about the history of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai, and how they were connected to the rest of the world through trade, and what made them so famous.
They traded across the Sahara. The Sahara means desert in Arabic. Right below (south) of the Sahara is the Sahel. The Sahel means shore in Arabic. Thus, goods were traded “from shore to shore” by people leading camel caravans across the “ocean” that is the Sahara. They did so by using camel caravans (as “ships”) and relying on the network of routes that are called The Gold Road. Merchants traded not only objects but with their movement, ideas and religions traveled with people, and helped contribute to the spread of Islam to Ghana, Mali and Songhai.
Begin the Jigsaw activity with an introductory discussion of the kind of work done by archaeologists and how their discoveries shape our concept of history. Identify that the monuments and artifacts of Egypt, Greece, and Rome are familiar. Far less is known about civilizations other than Egypt on the continent of Africa. Introduce students to Jenne Jeno.
Jenne-jeno became a center for sahel trade. Jenne-jeno is an ancient city located in the inland delta region of the Republic of Mali, West Africa, where the Bani and Niger Rivers meet. The city dates back to at least the 3rd century B.C. The old city is located 1.86 miles from modern Jenne, where merchants still sell many of the same products sold in ancient Jenne-Jeno and where there is a very famous mosque, the “Grand Mosque” of Jenne which is a world heritage site. The cosmopolitan nature of this ancient West African city has been researched by many archeologists.
Divide students into six teams and have each team read one section in “Finding West Africa’s Oldest City” by Susan and Roderick McIntosh in National Geographic and examine the accompanying photographs. The six sections are:
Each team should prepare a 1-2 page summary of their findings that summarizes for the class what they learned about ancient Africa, Jenne-jeno and/or the work of archaeologists from studying their section of the article.
After each group presents as a whole class discuss:
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Begin this activity by displaying or sharing the image of one panel of The Catalan Atlas with students and asking them to share observations as a class. As needed, prompt students with the following questions:
Teacher Note-Since the image featured is only part of a panel and there are 6 panels total, it might be good to show the whole thing first, then the whole one panel, then the part of a panel. https://pitt.libguides.com/silkroads/catalanatlas#:~:text=The%20map%20originally%20consisted%20of,to%20fold%20like%20a%20screen
After a brief brainstorm, make any related connections to student responses and introduce students to the Catalan Atlas. Key details to review include:
Explain to students that though we may not be able to read the Catalan language to determine which buildings are represented, the pictorial map shows there were many important architectural structures at the time of the atlas’ creation. In particular, direct students to observe the number of mosques that are present in West Africa as evidence of widespread Islam
Allow students to select and/or assign students to learn about one of the three key mosques/architectural markers on the The Gold Road Map and through independent research. Ask students to identify the location, the materials used, role in history, and how it provides insight into West African life and society. Note that the three mosques below are part of the same complex of Mosques in Mali and are listed as a UNESCO World heritages site.
You could also select other Architectural Markers as desired:
A final wrap-up to this activity would be to ensure students’ research revealed key points about religion in West Africa.
Students will create detailed maps, large and small, of West Africa using topographical and historical maps for reference. ‘Big Maps’ is an interdisciplinary teaching strategy to help students place the stories of history in relation to the lands and peoples whose lives and cultures they are studying. Students can embellish a base map with many different kinds of information from their discussions and readings as their study progresses.
The Catalan Atlas depicts a picture of a camel prominently. The camel was introduced to the region from Arabia around 100 BCE. The camel made crossing the Sahara possible, since the camel’s biology was adapted to it. Long eyelashes keep the sand from its eyes; its body temperature and fat storage abilities allow for long periods without water and in extreme heat; its soft and flat hooves can easily walk on the sand and gravel; and its high weight-bearing capacity can carry heavy loads. The camel is therefore known as “the ship” of the desert.
For this task, students should create a modern pictorial map similar to the Catalan Atlas with key figures and societal elements depicted. Key questions to be prepared to respond to orally and to show on the pictorial map include the following:
In West Africa, stories and traditions were passed down orally by generations of bards also known as djeli/jeli or griots. These individuals who are poets, praise singers, musicians, historians, were the designated historians not only of the royal family but of Mande society. Griot bard traditions of West Africa are also often accompanied by one of three instruments-the balafon (xylophone), the Kora (Lute-harp) or the ngoni (banjo) and these instruments also often accompanied the retelling of stories.
This activity invites students to write in the djeli tradition and thus to create praise poems about the object they chose. The goal of the poem is to celebrate the meaning of the object, its memory and its value, both past and present. Students are encouraged to embed their personal connections to the object as well.
The criteria for an excellent praise poem should be that the poems:
See an example of a praise poem written by Social Science/History teacher Gregory Hazelwood, M.Ed. who uses praise poems on The Gold Road with his high school students. The Baobab Tree Praise Poem
In djeli tradition, and if time allows, encourage students to volunteer to perform/read/recite their praise poem to their peers students in the audience.
Note: this performance task is directly inspired by Lesina Martin’s lesson shared at the Howard University Center for African Studies 2020 summer institute and posted here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EjB6Fy3vj0
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