Egalitarian Revolution in the Savanna: The Origins of a West African Political System (Approaches to Anthropological Archaeology)

Archaeological research at Kirikongo in Burkina Faso has uncovered a sequence critical to understanding the emergence of corporate political systems world-wide. The political organization of West African societies has long been a topic of intense anthropological debate owing in part to their immense diversity, but also due to their noncentralized distributions of power and authority. These discussions were very influential to general anthropological models during the colonial and immediate post-colonial period during the 1960s and 1970s. Unfortunately, many issues were unresolved before anthropology largely shifted its focus to other topics. Benefiting from this rich ethnographic and intellectual discourse, this volume addresses these debates from the archaeological record, which despite its great potential, has been rarely employed to discover the historical processes that created these socio-political systems. The developmental trajectory of one such society, the Bwa, is used to address a large gap in sociocultural evolutionary theory regarding the historical processes that result in the emergence of corporate political strategies, including those that create checks and balances on exclusionary power. These topics are investigated through a detailed exploration of socio-political processes during the Iron Age at the village settlement of Kirikongo (ca. AD 100-1450), located in the Mouhoun Bend of western Burkina Faso. Kirikongo began as a single homestead, but over the course of the 1st millennium AD, this founding house extended control over a growing community. Based in authority derived from the divinities of nature, ancestry, and later iron-working, by the early second millennium AD this house was socially ranked above others with material consequences. However, it is at this point that a revolution occurred in the community that decentralized power, and created many societal features common to modern West African societies. In examining the roots of this event, the book addresses many issues central to modern archaeology, including the social foundations for early sedentary life, the origins and development of institutionalized inequalities, the context for the emergence of craft specialization (both potting and metallurgy), and rejections of inequalities in power that create horizontally complex socio-political systems. The book provides original analysis of data collected by the author over several field seasons and includes environmental and ethnographic data previously unavailable to the Anglophone community.