Cambridge University Press
052181300X - Ancient Middle Niger - Urbanism And The Self-Organizing Landscape - by Roderick J. McIntosh
Frontmatter/Prelims

Ancient Middle Niger

The cities of West Africa’s Middle Niger, only recently brought to the world’s attention, make us rethink the “whys” and the “wheres” of ancient urbanism. These cities present the archaeologist with something of a novelty: a non-nucleated, clustered city-plan with no centralized, state-focused power. Ancient Middle Niger explores the emergence of these cities in the first millennium BC and the evolution of their hinterlands from the perspective of the self-organized landscape. Cities appeared in a series of profound transformations to the human–land relations and this book illustrates how each transformation was a leap in complexity. The book ends with an examination of certain critical moments in the emergence of other urban landscapes in Mesopotamia, along the Nile, and in northern China, through a Middle Niger lens. Highly illustrated throughout, this work is a key text for all students of African archaeology and of comparative pre-industrial urbanism.

RODERICK J. MCINTOSH is Professor of Anthropology at Rice University and visiting Professor of Archaeology at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. His recent publications include The Peoples of the Middle Niger. Island of Gold (1998), The Way the Wind Blows: Climate, History, and Human Action (2000), and Geomorphology and Human Palaeoecology of the Méma, Mali (2005).

Case Studies in Early Societies

Series Editor
Rita P. Wright, New York University

This series aims to introduce students to early societies that have been the subject of sustained archaeological research. Each study is also designed to demonstrate a contemporary method of archaeological analysis in action, and the authors are all specialists currently engaged in field research. The books have been planned to cover many of the same fundamental issues. Tracing long-term developments, and describing and analyzing a discrete segment in the prehistory or history of a region, they represent an invaluable tool for comparative analysis. Clear, well organized, authoritative and succinct, the case studies are an important resource for students, and for scholars in related fields, such as anthropology, ethnohistory, history and political science. They also offer the general reader accessible introductions to important archaeological sites.

Other titles in the series include:

Ancient Mesopotamia

SUSAN POLLOCK
Ancient Oaxaca

RICHARD E. BLANTON, GARY M. FEINMAN, STEPHEN A. KOWALEWSKI, LINDA M. NICHOLAS
Ancient Maya

ARTHUR DEMAREST
Ancient Jomon of Japan

JUNKO HABU
Ancient Puebloan Southwest

JOHN KANTNER
Ancient Cahokia and the Mississippians

TIMOTHY R. PAUKETAT
Ancient Middle Niger

ROD MCINTOSH

Ancient Middle Niger

Urbanism and the Self-Organizing Landscape

Roderick J. McIntosh

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press,
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no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2005

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN-13 978-0-521 81300-6 hardback

ISBN-10 0-521-81300-X hardback

ISBN-13 978-0-521-01243-0 paperback

ISBN-10 0-521-01243-0 paperback

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For Alex and Annick
The most precious companions in the field

List of illustrations		page viii
Preface		xii
Chronology		xv
Map of the Middle Niger		xvi
1	Discovery	1
	Jenne-jeno “discovered” to the world	1
	City without Citadel	10
	Ex astra (a brief history of values)	21
	Co-evolution: an alternative path	27
2	Transformed landscapes	45
	Historical Ecology	45
	Mesopotamia, with a difference	56
	Paleoclimate: phase shifts at multiple time-scales	73
	Geokistics: risk, surprise, and subsistence security	89
3	Accommodation	101
	Pulse Model	101
	Ground truthing the Pulse Model	123
	Specialists and the deep-time core rules of Mande	129
4	Excavation	144
	Recognizing heterogeneity	144
	Anchors and variability: the core sequence	162
	“Polynucleated sprawl”: Urban Clusters	181
5	Surveying the hinterland	192
	Prior strategies	192
	Systematic urban hinterland	197
	Resilience, urban sustainability, and the self-organizing landscape	203
6	Comparative urban landscapes	209
	Alternative cityscapes: Mesopotamia and the Nile	209
	China: the clustered alternative	221
References		230
Index		251

Illustrations

1	Map of the Middle Niger		page xvi
1.1	Panoramic view of the Jenne-jeno mound, viewed from the north	2
1.2	Donkey-cart, the only reliable transport over the tortured clays of the Middle Niger floodplain.	4
1.3	Fantasy of the Eponymous City, with citadel (by Matt Prater)	11
1.4	Ex astra: an idealized state hierarchy (by Tera Pruitt)	19
1.5	Alternate routes to clustering at the Jenne-jeno Urban Complex: expressed as cladograms	30
1.6	Idealized Lorenz phase transform diagram (by Matt Prater)	35
1.7	Four transforms of Middle Niger clustering (by Tera Pruitt)	37
1.8a–d Middle Niger urbanization dynamics represented as a phase transform diagram (by Matt Prater)		38–39
2.1a–c Three scales of Middle Niger and Vallée du Serpent hydrology		47–48
2.1a Pan-West-African representation of the continent’s hydrology		47
2.1b Western Sudanese hydrology and paleochannels		48
2.1c Longitudinal traverse from approximates 16 to 14° N latitude		48
2.2	High albedo villages at Méma–Macina border	54
2.3	Contrasted Middle Niger (Upper Delta), southern Mesopotamian, and Upper Nile floodplains	57
2.4	(Exploded) Middle Niger basins	59
2.5	Niger River drainage	62
2.6	Satellite imagery of folded ancient rocks in the Lake Faguibine area	64
2.7	Satellite image of ancient delta at the distal Macina	67
2.8	Geomorphology and hydrology of the Méma (by E. De Vries)	72
2.9	Distant proxy sequences suggest abrupt change and mode shifts characterize Middle Niger paleoclimate:
2.9a Holocene climate proxy measures and reconstructed sea surface temperatures from deep-sea sediment cores drilled off the Mauritanian coast		77
2.9b Bulk titanium record of the Cariaco Basin sediments		78
2.10	Middle Niger paleoclimatic phases and regional variations over the past 20,000 years (by Annick McIntosh)	80
2.11	Nicholson Sahelian climate modes (“anomaly types”)	86
2.12	Total yearly precipitation during the twentieth century: Timbuktu and Jenne (by Kate Ziegler)	88
2.13	Geokistic map of the Nile Valley	97
2.14	Simplified geokistic map of the Méma (by Matt Prater)	98
2.15	Satellite image of the Méma	99
3.1	Self-organizing landscape I (by Tera Pruitt)	103
3.2	Self-organizing landscape II (by Tera Pruitt)	104
3.3	Self-organizing landscape III (by Tera Pruitt)	106
3.4	Self-organizing landscape IV (by Tera Pruitt)	107
3.5	The Pulse Model	115
3.6	Vestigial corridor into the Sahara: the Xolimbiné paleochannel	118
3.7	Late Stone Age and Iron Age sites of the Méma	124
3.8	Comparison of the Mande view of landscape amplification with the hierarchical concept of ecosystem and information flow	140
3.9	Complementary landscape amplification when multiple, clustered corporations act together: Mande Ecological Diversity	142
4.1	The mille-feuille strata of Jenne-jeno	145
4.2	Smith’s workshop with protective statuette pair (reconstruction by Matt Harvey)	154
4.3	Smith’s ritual “altar” (reconstruction by Matt Harvey)	156
4.4	Frequency of representational art recovered at Jenne-jeno	159
4.5	Anchoring sequence of Middle Niger urbanism (by Annick McIntosh)	165
4.6	The Dia cluster	168
4.7	From the surface, the Jenne-jeno unit LX swamped by the vastness of the tell’s surface	170
4.8	Sampling variability: units and cores at Jenne-jeno	172
4.9	Alternative hypotheses for initial colonization: clustered or large singularity	173
4.10	Planimetric reconstruction of the wall complexes at SM-O (by J. LaRocca)	178
4.11	The Dia Urban Cluster	182
4.12	The Jenne-jeno Urban Complex (by Matt Prater)	184
4.13	Aerial perspective on the Jenne-jeno Urban Complex	186
4.14	Functional complementarity within the Jenne-jeno Urban Complex (by Matt Prater)	187
5.1	The Togola and MacDonald vehicular survey of the Méma	195
5.2	Survey region near Timbuktu and Mangabéra	196
5.3	Region of the extensive Jenne hinterland survey	198
5.4	Region of the Dia hinterland survey	201
5.5	Final phase transform diagram of the Middle Niger urban landscape	202
6.1	Ubaid and Uruk period settlements from the Warka Survey	212
6.2	“Beads-on-a-string” emergent polities to proto-states along the Predynastic Nile	218
6.3	Longshan-period clustered urbanism in coastal Shandong, China	226
6.4	Vibratory alternation of heterarchy and nested authority (by Matt Prater)	228
6.5	Abana!	229

Permissions

Cover: Aerial photograph of Jenne, Mali, kindly provided by G. Tappan

Original art work, commissioned for this book or used with permission, by:

Matt Prater: Figs. 1.3, 1.6, 1.8a–d, 2.4, 2.12, 2.14, 4.12, 4.14, 5.5, 6.4

Tera Pruitt: Figs. 1.4, 1.7, 3.1–3.4

Matt Harvey: Figs. 4.2, 4.3

Edwin DeVries: Fig 2.8

Annick McIntosh: Figs. 2.10, 4.5

Harry Rowe: Fig. 2.11

Kate Ziegler: Fig. 2.12

J. LaRocca: Fig. 4.10

M. Kirtley and A. Kirtley: Fig. 4.13

T. Togola: Fig. 5.1

A. Schmidt: Fig. 5.3 (right side)

Satellite imagery kindly provided by G. Tappan: Figs. 2.2, 2.6, 2.7, 2.15

Map 1. “The Middle Niger” superimposed over West Africa, kindly provided by the Rice University GIS/DATA Center

Fig. 2.3 (upper left and center). From Archaeological Landscapes of the Near East, by T. J. Wilkinson, Fig. 5.6a and b (after R. McC. Adams,