Two Thousand Years in Dendi, Northern Benin : Archaeology, History and Memory
- Submitting institution
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The University of East Anglia
- Unit of assessment
- 25 - Area Studies
- Output identifier
- 182633077
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Brill, Leiden
- ISBN
- 978-90-04-37669-4
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- October
- Year of publication
- 2018
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Haour is an Africanist archaeologist who also works across historical and anthropological disciplines. Between 2011 and 2015, as PI, she led a project funded by the European Research Council. The aim was to document material culture past and present from a stretch of the Niger River Valley which was subject to conflicting historical descriptions of its medieval landscape. Such descriptions ranged from “empty and lawless” to suggestions it was a trading hub between several powerful empires. But there exist no local written sources.
This book is a result of that project and constitutes entirely original data. Haour’s international team of 80 people documented hundreds of previously unknown sites, tens of thousands of objects, and hundreds of interviews with local informants. A regional framework was established, documenting material culture, subsistence, technological practices, stories about the past, and settlement sequences. An unexpectedly dense medieval settlement was documented and light shed on craft practices and migration trajectories of communities past and present. These new data underpinning the text are set within the broader context of history, palaeoenvironment, landforms and vegetation.
As editor, Haour selected which team members would contribute material to this book and authored or co-authored 13 of the 28 chapters and 11 of the 35 datasets. The research has been disseminated though journal articles and chapters, 6 PhD and 5 MA theses, engagement sessions with communities, and conference papers.
Before this work, nobody knew much about the history of this area, which sits on some of the world’s major axes of communication. We now know it was densely occupied in medieval times, with important ramifications for wider questions around the power base of precolonial polities, linkages between past and present cultural groups, communications along the Niger and across the Sahara, and the role of disease, environmental change, and enslavement.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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