- Duke Kunshan University
No 8 Duke Avenue
Kunshan, Jiangsu 215316
China
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Duke Kunshan University 昆山杜克大学
中国江苏省昆山市杜克大道8号 邮编：215316
- Bowdoin College, Sociology and Anthropology, Faculty Memberadd
- Anthropology, Archaeology, African Archaeology, Genetic Archaeology, Archaeological GIS, Social Archaeology, and 18 moreLandscape Archaeology, Archaeogenetics, Archaeometry, Enviromental Archaeology, Archaeological survey, Archaeology of Colonialism, Historical Archaeology, Trans-Saharan Burials, Race and Ethnicity, Africa, Genetics, African Studies, Cultural Heritage Management, Garamantes, Archaeology of ethnicity, West African Archaeology, Archaeological Method & Theory, and Prehistoryedit
- I am a Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology, and Vice-Chancellor for Academic Affairs, at Duke Kunshan Universit... moreI am a Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology, and Vice-Chancellor for Academic Affairs, at Duke Kunshan University. I hold MA and PhD degrees in archaeology from the University of Calgary. I have been involved in archaeological research projects in Cameroon, Chad, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, the United States and Canada. Most of my research since the mid-1980s has taken place around the Mandara Mountains of northern Cameroon and Nigeria. My main research interests are in state formation processes in Africa, the archaeological study of ethnicity and social boundaries, African cultural heritage management, and African and global archaeogenetics.edit
Kerma, Aksum, Mali, Kanem, Makuria, Abissinia, Ifat, Ifé, Congo, Zimbabwe, sono tante le società africane che, ben prima dell'influsso delle potenze straniere, irradiarono la propria presenza dialogando con il resto del mondo. Questo... more
Kerma, Aksum, Mali, Kanem, Makuria, Abissinia, Ifat, Ifé, Congo, Zimbabwe, sono tante le società africane che, ben prima dell'influsso delle potenze straniere, irradiarono la propria presenza dialogando con il resto del mondo. Questo libro ci svela l'inedita storia dell'antico continente, riportandoci lungo le strade che attrassero i mercanti greci e arabi nelle grandi capitali africane, o su quelle che condussero i pellegrini saheliani da Timbuctu alla Mecca e i diplomatici nubiani da Dongola a Baghdad. L'affascinante mosaico di un continente in movimento, lontano dagli stereotipi culturali, traboccante delle singolarità sociali di pastori, cacciatori-raccoglitori, fabbri e vasai... Arricchito da più di trecento immagini, carte geografiche, disegni e rilievi archeologici, questo libro è frutto della collaborazione dei migliori specialisti delle singole aree geografico-culturali. La storia dell'Africa è il prodotto dell'equilibrio tra il periodo breve delle singole vite e quello lunghissimo delle profondità culturali. Evitando ogni cliché, il libro raccoglie una sfida: fare di ogni minima traccia una fonte di storia, presentandoci dunque siti archeologici, scritti di monaci o di scribi reali, incisioni e pitture rupestri, gioielli, oggetti di culto o di vita quotidiana, frammenti di lingue, abiti, Dna di piante, paesaggi plasmati dall'uomo, rievocazioni orali. Un cantiere di ricerca per scoprire da prospettive inedite la storia antica dell'intero continente africano.
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For the past decade, Boko Haram has relentlessly terrorized northeastern Nigeria. Few if any explanations for the rise of this violent insurgent group look beyond its roots in worldwide jihadism and recent political conflicts in central... more
For the past decade, Boko Haram has relentlessly terrorized northeastern Nigeria. Few if any explanations for the rise of this violent insurgent group look beyond its roots in worldwide jihadism and recent political conflicts in central Africa.
Searching for Boko Haram is the first book to examine the insurgency within the context of centuries, millennia even, of cultural change in the region. The book surveys the deep history of the lands south of Lake Chad, richly documented in archaeology and texts, to show how ancient natural and cultural events can aid in our understanding of Boko Haram's present agenda. The land's historical narrative stretches back five centuries, with cultural origins that plunge even deeper into the past. One important feature of this past is the phenomenon of frontiers and borderlands. In striking ways, Boko Haram resembles the frontier slave raiders and warlords who figure in precolonial and colonial writings on the southern Lake Chad Basin. Presently, these accounts are paralleled by the activity of smugglers, bandits (coupeurs de route--"road cutters"), and tax evaders. The borderlands of these countries are today places where the state often refuses to exercise its full authority because of the profits and opportunities illicit relationships afford state officials and bureaucrats. For the local community, Boko Haram's actions are readily understandable in terms of slave raids and borderlands. They are not mysterious and unprecedented eruptions of violence and savagery, but--as the book argues--recognizable phenomena within the contexts of local politics and history.
Written from the perspective of an author who has worked in this part of Africa for more than thirty years, Searching for Boko Haram provides vital historical context to the recent rise of this terroristic force, and counters misperceptions of their activities and of the region as a whole.
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/searching-for-boko-haram-9780190492526
Searching for Boko Haram is the first book to examine the insurgency within the context of centuries, millennia even, of cultural change in the region. The book surveys the deep history of the lands south of Lake Chad, richly documented in archaeology and texts, to show how ancient natural and cultural events can aid in our understanding of Boko Haram's present agenda. The land's historical narrative stretches back five centuries, with cultural origins that plunge even deeper into the past. One important feature of this past is the phenomenon of frontiers and borderlands. In striking ways, Boko Haram resembles the frontier slave raiders and warlords who figure in precolonial and colonial writings on the southern Lake Chad Basin. Presently, these accounts are paralleled by the activity of smugglers, bandits (coupeurs de route--"road cutters"), and tax evaders. The borderlands of these countries are today places where the state often refuses to exercise its full authority because of the profits and opportunities illicit relationships afford state officials and bureaucrats. For the local community, Boko Haram's actions are readily understandable in terms of slave raids and borderlands. They are not mysterious and unprecedented eruptions of violence and savagery, but--as the book argues--recognizable phenomena within the contexts of local politics and history.
Written from the perspective of an author who has worked in this part of Africa for more than thirty years, Searching for Boko Haram provides vital historical context to the recent rise of this terroristic force, and counters misperceptions of their activities and of the region as a whole.
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/searching-for-boko-haram-9780190492526
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Over the past 40 years, traditional perspectives on the constitution of human groups have been subjected to stringent critique within anthropology. This began with the dismantling of accepted "race" divisions after World... more
Over the past 40 years, traditional perspectives on the constitution of human groups have been subjected to stringent critique within anthropology. This began with the dismantling of accepted "race" divisions after World War II and continued with analyses of the meaning and reality of African "tribal" distinctions from the 1960s until the present. Archaeologists, ethnographers, linguists, and historians of Africa now work within a research milieu where social interactions, cultural exchange, and the dynamic nature of group identifications are accepted as a normal part of the human experience. At the same time, new techniques have been developed for the examination of human history, techniques based upon an expanding repertoire of tools for the analysis of genetic variability in human populations. Perhaps the most striking result of this research has been Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, and Piazza's The History and Geography of Human Genes. Rather less attention has been paid, however, to the conceptual relationships between the human groups defined through such analyses, in Africa and elsewhere, and those defined through other kinds of research. This paper is a preliminary examination of the fit between genetic, archaeological, and ethnographic data on the African past.
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The northeastern Mandara Mountains of Cameroon and Nigeria are occupied at high population densities, with households spread across an abrupt mountain landscape. Ritual and political power in this area inheres to a great extent to the... more
The northeastern Mandara Mountains of Cameroon and Nigeria are occupied at high population densities, with households spread across an abrupt mountain landscape. Ritual and political power in this area inheres to a great extent to the physical being of the mountains themselves. The exercise of such power is dispersed within mountain households, with few opportunities for aggregation of authority through control of communal activity in public spaces. The plains around these mountains are occupied at lower densities, by nucleated Islamic communities integrated within the Wandala state. Fewer roles for household ritual remain, and communal activity in public spaces is controlled by Wandala elites. Archaeological data indicate that the predecessors of both mountain and plains societies were iron-using communities in the plains around the massif. This article discusses the evolution of ritual and political systems over the last two millennia, from the plains to the mountains above them, and the implications of those changes for our understanding of how prehistoric groups in this area would have used public and private spaces.
Research Interests: Sociology, Geography, Archaeology, Politics, Social Archaeology, and 3 moreIslam, Prehistory, and Massif
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For the most part, the boundaries of African Studies remain fixed at the shores of that continent, with periodic excursions into diasporic communities across the seas. The northern limits of this enquiry into `Africa' are, however,... more
For the most part, the boundaries of African Studies remain fixed at the shores of that continent, with periodic excursions into diasporic communities across the seas. The northern limits of this enquiry into `Africa' are, however, more vaguely located, placed somewhere in the Sahara when they are thought of at all. This imprecision in the northern frontiers of `Africa' is closely related to traditional conceptions of race on the continent, and especially of a distinction between `Negroid' and `Caucasoid' peoples and histories. Recent genetic research in and to the south of the Sahara suggests that such distinctions are false, and that human biological variability in these regions does not accord with racialized models. Nevertheless, such models continue to be widely used in popular interpretations of events in these regions — most strikingly, today, in Darfur.
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Previous studies have highlighted how African genomes have been shaped by a complex series of historical events. Despite this, genome-wide data have only been obtained from a small proportion of present-day ethnolinguistic groups. By... more
Previous studies have highlighted how African genomes have been shaped by a complex series of historical events. Despite this, genome-wide data have only been obtained from a small proportion of present-day ethnolinguistic groups. By analyzing new autosomal genetic variation data of 1333 individuals from over 150 ethnic groups from Cameroon, Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Nigeria, and Sudan, we demonstrate a previously underappreciated fine-scale level of genetic structure within these countries, for example, correlating with historical polities in western Cameroon. By comparing genetic variation patterns among populations, we infer that many northern Cameroonian and Sudanese groups share genetic links with multiple geographically disparate populations, likely resulting from long-distance migrations. In Ghana and Nigeria, we infer signatures of intermixing dated to over 2000 years ago, corresponding to reports of environmental transformations possibly related to climate change. We al...
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Research Interests: Geography and Boko Haram
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info:eu-repo/semantics/published
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The distribution of Chadic languages in Africa is extremely diverse, including the widely dispersed Hausa language, the more restricted Central Chadic languages in the southern Lake Chad Basin, and the poorly understood Eastern Chadic... more
The distribution of Chadic languages in Africa is extremely diverse, including the widely dispersed Hausa language, the more restricted Central Chadic languages in the southern Lake Chad Basin, and the poorly understood Eastern Chadic languages in Chad. These distributions are disjunct in complex ways, and the relationships between Chadic and neighboring language families is extremely complicated. The genesis of these distributions lies in the mid-Holocene, with the occupation of the Lake Chad Basin by populations faced by the desiccation of the Sahara and the opening of arable lands further south. Further differentiation of Chadic languages appears to be associated with sociopolitical developments in the region, especially over the last 1,000 years. This chapter will consider the methodological challenges associated with studying the history of these populations using archaeological, linguistic, and genetic data, as well as providing an initial framework for understanding the socia...
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This collection of papers amply illustrates the potentials of different engagements with concepts of mobility in Africanist archaeology. All five are impressive examinations of a variety of different research issues from different parts... more
This collection of papers amply illustrates the potentials of different engagements with concepts of mobility in Africanist archaeology. All five are impressive examinations of a variety of different research issues from different parts of the continent and their authors provide new and interesting perspectives on those research questions. All involve well-thought-out but straightforward and quite accessible research methodologies: I want to note this latter point because of the increasing dangers of two-tier archaeology in Africa (and elsewhere), where very advanced and expensive research methodologies are not available to all researchers. At the same time, these papers work with concepts of mobility in the plural, with quite different research orientations and datasets, and it is difficult for me at least to detect common threads that would allow these projects to be united under a single analytical framework centred on some unifying concept of mobility. They do good things individually, but the question is: what do they all do in common, besides making use of the term ‘mobility’? I first consider usages of the concept of mobility in each paper and then come back to this question at the end of this short review. The papers by Boles and Lane and by Antonites and Ashley look at different parts of the continent and quite different socio-economic systems: eastern versus southern Africa, relatively egalitarian pastoralist societies versus agropastoral communities variably embedded in political hierarchies. At the same time, they are comparable in their deployment of ideas of mobility that work in both spatial and social registers: social identities change, intersect and overlap as people, materials and ideas moved across landscapes, and in ways that refuse any sense of fixed ethnic boundaries or ethnic primordialism. Critically, both papers do so in ways that are informed by local and wider research histories. The Boles and Lane paper looks back to an extensive literature on transformations in pastoral identities in East Africa, summarised most extensively in Spear and Waller’s Being Maasai (1993), to understand how site formation processes on the ground might reflect interaction spheres before the inappropriately-named ‘Maasai civil war’ period of the mid-nineteenth century. The Antonites and Ashley paper is written in the context of long-standing and sometimes vehement debates about the role of sociopolitical hierarchy and ethnographic analogies in their region. Its account of the discovery of quite high-prestige artefacts at sites that might otherwise be considered remote or marginal also leads the authors to an exciting consideration of how cultural/economic/political systems worked along the margins of polities. They note — but might have emphasised further — that states may be very much complicit in ceding some degree of control over their borders.
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ABSTRACT Boko Haram is a religiously motivated insurgency with a complex history in Nigeria and origins in urban Maiduguri. Through most of its existence Boko Haram has shown an affinity for border regions: the frontier zones between... more
ABSTRACT Boko Haram is a religiously motivated insurgency with a complex history in Nigeria and origins in urban Maiduguri. Through most of its existence Boko Haram has shown an affinity for border regions: the frontier zones between Nigeria and Niger, the Mandara Mountains on the border with Cameroon, and the shorelines and islands of Lake Chad. This paper argues that this is an historically mediated process. Boko Haram as a borderland phenomenon echoes the hijra of Usman dan Fodio, but also structured forms of violence and wealth creation that have historically united elites and their followers in the region. Moreover, there are continuities between the actions and actors associated with earlier phases of border violence and processes involving Boko Haram today. This suggests that Boko Haram will not be “defeated,” but rather that the region will see a reversion to forms of border violence that were prevalent as recently as the early 2000s.
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We present a new statistical approach to analysing an extremely common archaeological data type-potsherds-that infers the structure of cultural relationships across a set of excavation units (EUs). This method, applied to data from a set... more
We present a new statistical approach to analysing an extremely common archaeological data type-potsherds-that infers the structure of cultural relationships across a set of excavation units (EUs). This method, applied to data from a set of complex, culturally heterogeneous sites around the Mandara mountains in the Lake Chad Basin, helps elucidate cultural succession through the Neolithic and Iron Age. We show how the approach can be integrated with radiocarbon dates to provide detailed portraits of cultural dynamics and deposition patterns within single EUs. In this context, the analysis supports ancient cultural segregation analogous to historical ethnolinguistic patterning in the region. We conclude with a discussion of the many possible model extensions using other archaeological data types.
Research Interests: Geography, Mathematics, Archaeology, Geology, Archaeological Method & Theory, and 15 moreCulture, Cameroon, Nigeria, Medicine, The Royal Society, Quantitative methods (Archaeology), Bayesian statistics & modelling, Biological Sciences, Ceramics, African Archaeology, Humans, Radiometric Dating, Statistics in archaeology, Ceramic Analysis Archaeology, and Medical and Health Sciences
The locations of diy-geδ-bay (DGB) sites in the Mandara Mountains, northern Cameroon are hypothesized to occur as a function of their ability to see and be seen from points on the surrounding landscape. A series of geostatistical, two-way... more
The locations of diy-geδ-bay (DGB) sites in the Mandara Mountains, northern Cameroon are hypothesized to occur as a function of their ability to see and be seen from points on the surrounding landscape. A series of geostatistical, two-way and Bayesian logistic regression analyses were performed to test two hypotheses related to the intervisibility of the sites to one another and their visual prominence on the landscape. We determine that the intervisibility of the sites to one another is highly statistically significant when compared to 10 stratified-random permutations of DGB sites. Bayesian logistic regression additionally demonstrates that the visibility of the sites to points on the surrounding landscape is statistically significant. The location of sites appears to have also been selected on the basis of lower slope than random permutations of sites. Using statistical measures, many of which are not commonly employed in archaeological research, to evaluate aspects of visibility...
Research Interests: Archaeology, Spatial Analysis, Landscape Archaeology, Biology, Cameroon, and 12 moreMedicine, Multidisciplinary, Logistic Regression, Bayesian statistics & modelling, Cluster Analysis, PLoS one, Visibility/invisibility, Bayes Theorem, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Logistic Models, DGB sites, and Mandara Mountains
The northern Mandara Mountains of Cameroon have been a focus of slave raiding for the past five centuries, according to historical sources. Some captives from the area were enslaved locally, primarily in Wandala and Fulbe communities,... more
The northern Mandara Mountains of Cameroon have been a focus of slave raiding for the past five centuries, according to historical sources. Some captives from the area were enslaved locally, primarily in Wandala and Fulbe communities, while others were exported to Sahelian polities or further abroad. This chapter examines ethnohistorical and archaeological data on nineteenth- and twentieth-century slave raiding, derived from research in montagnard communities along the north-eastern Mandara Mountains of Cameroon. Enslavement and slave raiding existed within larger structures of day-to-day practice in the region, and were closely tied to ideas about sociality, social proximity and violence. Through the mid-1980s at least, enslavement in the region was understood as a still-relevant political and economic process, with its chief material consequence the intensely domesticated Mandara landscape.
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ABSTRACT The DGB sites are complexes of dry-stone terraces and platforms in the Mandara Mountains of northern Cameroon. They constitute the earliest well-established evidence for human occupation of this region and raise important... more
ABSTRACT The DGB sites are complexes of dry-stone terraces and platforms in the Mandara Mountains of northern Cameroon. They constitute the earliest well-established evidence for human occupation of this region and raise important questions about the nature of monumentality, relationships with social complexity and areal culture history. The present state of knowledge of the DGB sites and questions arising are summarised and reviewed. While it appears that the sites represent indigenous responses to major areal droughts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, this is neither a complete explanation nor does it address the relationship between the montagnards and the state societies at that time developing in the surrounding plains. Deeper understanding of the DGB sites requires research into their variation and their roles within inhabited landscapes, as well as a reformulation of largely implicit models of historical process and agency corresponding to a topographical dichotomisation of mountain and plains.
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This special issue of Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa contains papers written in honour of Graham Connah, one of the most widely known and widely respected of Africanist archaeologists and writers on the archaeology of African... more
This special issue of Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa contains papers written in honour of Graham Connah, one of the most widely known and widely respected of Africanist archaeologists and writers on the archaeology of African societies. The papers in this ...
Research Interests: Archaeology and Azania
ABSTRACT The DGB sites, with their striking dry-stone architecture, are the largest and among the earliest archaeological sites in the northern Mandara Mountains of Cameroon. Even given their size and internal complexity, they provide... more
ABSTRACT The DGB sites, with their striking dry-stone architecture, are the largest and among the earliest archaeological sites in the northern Mandara Mountains of Cameroon. Even given their size and internal complexity, they provide only ambiguous messages about what power and authority might have looked like in the region five centuries ago. At the same time, these sites are situated in proximity to the heartland of the Wandala polity, which was first noted in European and Arabic sources over the period of DGB occupation. Over the next centuries, Wandala progressively differentiated itself from neighbouring Chadic-speaking communities, adopting the political appurtenances and expansionist tactics of an Islamic Sudanic state. This paper discusses the implications of this geographic and political proximity for both Wandala and the occupants of the DGB sites.
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can be found at:Journal of Social ArchaeologyAdditional services and information for
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The introduction of agriculture is known to have profoundly affected the ecological complexion of landscapes. In this study, a rapid transition from C3 to C4 vegetation is inferred from a shift to higher stable carbon (13C/12C) isotope... more
The introduction of agriculture is known to have profoundly affected the ecological complexion of landscapes. In this study, a rapid transition from C3 to C4 vegetation is inferred from a shift to higher stable carbon (13C/12C) isotope ratios of soils and sediments in the Benoué River Valley and upland Fali Mountains in northern Cameroon. Landscape change is viewed from the perspective of two settlement mounds and adjacent floodplains, as well as a rock terrace agricultural field dating from 1100 cal yr BP to the recent past (<400 cal yr BP). Nitrogen (15N/14N) isotope ratios and soil micromorphology demonstrate variable uses of land adjacent to the mound sites. These results indicate that Early Iron Age settlement practices involved exploitation of C3 plants on soils with low δ15N values, indicating wetter soils. Conversely, from the Late Iron Age (>700 cal yr BP) until recent times, high soil and sediment δ13C and δ15N values reflect more C4 biomass and anthropogenic organic...
Research Interests: Landscape Ecology, Archaeology, Geology, Geomorphology, Sedimentology, and 11 moreStable Isotope Analysis, Geoarchaeology, Origins of Agriculture, Quaternary, Human-Environment Interactions, Iron Age, Sedimentary geology and stratigraphy, African Archaeology, Geoarchaeology and Paleoenvironmental Reconstructions, Anthropocene, and West African Archaeology
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Download a branded Cambridge Journals Online toolbar (for IE 7 only). What is this? ... Add Cambridge Journals Online as a search option in your browser toolbar. What is this? ... NIGERIAN ARCHAEOLOGY Historical Archaeology in Nigeria.... more
Download a branded Cambridge Journals Online toolbar (for IE 7 only). What is this? ... Add Cambridge Journals Online as a search option in your browser toolbar. What is this? ... NIGERIAN ARCHAEOLOGY Historical Archaeology in Nigeria. Edited by KIT W. WESLER. Trenton ...
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In 2008, a number of iron artefacts were recovered from an interior courtyard on the DGB-1 site during fieldwork in 2008. DGB-1 is a large multi-function site located in the northeastern Mandara Mountains of Cameroon, and dating to the... more
In 2008, a number of iron artefacts were recovered from an interior courtyard on the DGB-1 site during fieldwork in 2008. DGB-1 is a large multi-function site located in the northeastern Mandara Mountains of Cameroon, and dating to the mid-second millennium AD. The iron artefacts recovered included a cache of spear/arrow points found buried under a living floor, as well as a local hoe and a chain and a ‘barrette’ probably not of local provenance. This discovery has a number of points of interest: (1) ethnoarchaeological reenactments of iron smelts in the 1980s in the same region provide a rare opportunity for comparison of iron-working techniques over about five centuries in sub-Saharan Africa; (2) the variability in different forms of iron (including eutectoid steel) used in these artefacts; and (3) the welding of different forms of iron to produce composite artefacts.
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State Formation and Enslavement in the Southern Lake Chad Basin SCOTT MACEACHERN Archaeological and historical data indicate that drastic changes in settlement pattern-ing and in power relationships between ethnic groups took place in the... more
State Formation and Enslavement in the Southern Lake Chad Basin SCOTT MACEACHERN Archaeological and historical data indicate that drastic changes in settlement pattern-ing and in power relationships between ethnic groups took place in the southern Lake Chad ...
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A Powerpoint presentation used in a public lecture on Boko Haram as an historical phenomenon
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There has been less archaeology done in Africa than on any other continent, and the prehistory of large areas remains more or less unknown. Progress in historical genetics in Africa, particularly over the last decade, offers an extremely... more
There has been less archaeology done in Africa than on any other continent, and the prehistory of large areas remains more or less unknown. Progress in historical genetics in Africa, particularly over the last decade, offers an extremely powerful way of looking at population movements and contacts in the past, and the comparison of archaeological and genetic data offers the prospects of a vast improvement in our understanding of African prehistory. At the same time, there are dangers involved in such interdisciplinary undertakings: archaeological and genetic data offer insights into different aspects of human history, and each approach has its own strengths and weaknesses. This lecture will offer a discussion of these issues, with examples drawn from the Lake Chad Basin and other parts of the continent.
The northern Mandara Mountains of Cameroon and Nigeria are culturally one of the most complicated areas on the continent, with more than two dozen languages spoken sometimes at distances of only a few kilometers, with ethnic and social... more
The northern Mandara Mountains of Cameroon and Nigeria are culturally one of the most complicated areas on the continent, with more than two dozen languages spoken sometimes at distances of only a few kilometers, with ethnic and social diversity to match. Research over the last 30 years has provided us with in formation on the prehistory of regions around the Mandara massif, but we know far less about the settlement of the mountains themselves. The discovery of the DGB sites promises to change this situation. These sites are complexes of dry-stone terraces and platforms that make up some of the most striking examples of indigenous African stone architecture between Ethiopia and Great Zimbabwe. Their function is, at this point, enigmatic, but they seem to have played a significant role in political relations in the southern Lake Chad Basin five centuries ago.
Over the last 500 years, Mandara communities were involved in complex social and economic interchanges with Islamic states, while remaining culturally distinct on the frontiers of the Islamic world. Small-scale chiefdoms and even more egalitarian societies dominate the Mandara political landscape, and seem to have done so in the past as well. Anthropologists usually think such societies are destined to evolve toward more-centralized states, but the Mandara case suggests that they can function as independent sociopolitical units over the long term. My work on the DGB sites examines the ways in which prehistoric Mandara communities maintained their independence in this very complex political landscape.
Over the last 500 years, Mandara communities were involved in complex social and economic interchanges with Islamic states, while remaining culturally distinct on the frontiers of the Islamic world. Small-scale chiefdoms and even more egalitarian societies dominate the Mandara political landscape, and seem to have done so in the past as well. Anthropologists usually think such societies are destined to evolve toward more-centralized states, but the Mandara case suggests that they can function as independent sociopolitical units over the long term. My work on the DGB sites examines the ways in which prehistoric Mandara communities maintained their independence in this very complex political landscape.