northeastern africa

Northeastern Africa

• Wadi Kubbaniya (Egypt) - wild grasses and grinding stones (16-15,000 BC)

• sickles (13-9,000 BC) for harvesting wild grasses

Nabta Playa, Eastern SaharaSouthern Egypt

• 7-6,000 BC – early pottery making culture based on hunting and harvesting wild grasses (including sorghum) and fruits, recovered from 100+ hearths and other cooking features;

• sorghum, at least, in possible early stage of domestication, although debated by some who feel wild sorghum only domesticated much later (4000-2000 BC);

• Possible domesticated African cattle, or at least hard for wild cattle to survive independent of humans in this area

Bir Kiseiba, Egypt (Eastern Sahara)

Early evidence of domesticated cattle in Africa (Bos primigenius), ca. 7-6000 BC

By ca. 6000 BC sheep and goats introduced from Near East and incorporated into Saharan Pastoral Neolithic

Nomadic Pastoralism dependence upon domesticated stock and a mobile lifestyle

NeolithicTethering

Stones

Farming communitiesin lower Nile (Egypt)ca. 5000 BC

Merimde (18 ha; 45 acres)Fayum

Near Eastern Complex of Wheat, Barley, Goats, and Sheep

Fertile Crescent

Expansion of Near EastFarming complex into Africa, notably wheats,

Barley, goats, and sheep

Nabta Playastone circle

Neolithic Megaliths (astronomical alignment)

ca. 5000 BC

After ca. 3000 BC Spread of Pastoral

Neolithic & Farming (?) into Sahel/E Africa

(Following Tsetse Fly-free regions)

WET

DRY

Modern Distribution of Tsetse Fly

Distribution of wild ancestors of Sub-Saharandomesticated African Plants suggests one broad region

encompassing 3 Domestic Complexes

Savanna complex: sorghum, African rice, peanuts, millets, watermelonForest margin complex: millets, beans, robusta coffee, oil palm, yams

Ethiopian complex: millet, tef, noog, arabica coffee, enset (“false banana”), chat

Forest margin

savanna

Ethiopian

Root Crop Agriculture (yams) and Arboriculture

(oil palm) in Tropical Forest and Woodland

Areas of Western, Central, and Southern Africa (how old?, likely

2,000 to 1,000 BC or earlier)

Continuation of Hunting and Gathering in some areas until historic times(trade and colonialism)

Yam “barn” in Nigeria forest regionOil palm

Abelam (Sepik River, New Guinea, decorated yams)

Bantu-speakers

British-AmericanEnglish

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3

• Bantu farming people expanded relatively quickly into lands occupied by hunter gatherers, displacing or absorbing them and, in some areas, developing complementary trade relations between foragers and early farmers. 

 • Bantu speakers now number about 60 million,

and most of sub-Saharan Africa now speaks some version of the Niger-Congo language family.

Tropical linguistic diaspora (beginning ca. 1,000 BC)

Arawak &others

Austronesian

Bantu

Ancestral Bantu Society

• Economics: Food production (yams and oil palm), with hunted, fished, and foraged foods (livestock complex of Saharan Africa did not do well in tropical forested areas; introduced later in eastern and southern Africa)

• Technology: Ceramics, iron (later), settled villages• Settlement: settled plaza villages composed of “Houses”

(kingroups based on lineal descent), and organized into districts of related houses

• Social political organization: hierarchical (conical clan) chiefship, matrilineal descent groups, initiation and elite life crisis rites, in-law avoidance

Chifumbaze ceramic complex of central and southern Africa

(e.g., Urewe, Kwale, Matola wares);

Spread by iron working farmers

Modern Bantu pottery

Pottery and iron artifacts used to track Bantu dispersals

Iron-working• Diffusion from SW Asia and Mediterranean or independent

indigenous development?

• Neolithic to Iron Age with no transitional bronze production, to some means that technology diffused from SW Asia fully developed.

• The primitive iron-smelting furnaces at Taruga (Nigeria) date from 400 BC, oldest evidence in West Africa (as early as Meroë in Sudan; seen by diffusionists as the staging point for spread of iron-working into tropical Africa from Egypt);

• Sites in Rwanda/Burundi possibly earlier, before 1000 BC• Iron first seems to be used for ceremonial, decorative, and

high-value artifacts, later becoming increasingly important as weapons and utilitarian tools

Terra-cotta statues, 500 BC-AD 200, made byearly iron-working farmers

Nok site, near Taruga, on western

slopes of Jos plateau (Nigeria)

Bantu homeland inNigeria/Cameroon

Kingdom of Kongo, 1711

Major Bantu-speaking urban settlement, after ca. AD 1200-1500

As many as 18,000 people

Gedi, Kenya

Origins of the urban sites on the Swahilicoast and adjacent parts of the interior

are clearly indigenous (Bantu) developments, but subsequent growth between AD 1000-1500

due to trade in Indian Ocean, which laterinvolved conversion to Islam

Niger-Congo

Middle Niger (Inland Delta)

Middle Niger

• Prior to 300 BC, higher annual floods in Inland Delta area of the middle Niger River in the Sahel, just south of Sahara, meant little high land for permanent occupations;

• Wetter conditions also meant insect-born diseases, especially tsetse fly, discouraged settled occupation;

• 200 BC to AD 100, region (Sahel) became drier and herders and farmers of southern Sahara desert moved into area;

• Initial occupation of important site of Jenné-jeno, which became important urban and trade center during first millennium AD.

Jenné-jeno• Large community (12 ha; 30 acres) of round houses with mud

foundations by AD 100, reaching its maximum extent of by AD 850, which included town area of over 40 ha (100 acres), with a mud-brick wall about 2km long

• Multi-centric urban settlement composed of occupation areas clustered around ecological features: rice-growing soils, levees for wet-season pasture, basins for dry-season pasture, access to major river channels for communication and trade.

• Evidence of North African or Islamic influences appears at Jenné-jeno in the form of brass, spindle whorls, and rectilinear houses, ca. AD 1200.

• After this point, Jenné-jeno begins decline and is abandoned by 1400, as neighboring historical city of Djenné becomes regional center.

Multi-centric Urbanism

Round house at Jenné-jenoExcavation of Jenné-jeno Mound

Djenné

Djenné, Mali

Koumbi Saleh, Ancient Ghana,

starting after AD 500

Timbuktu, Trans-Saharan caravan trade &

Songhai empire, 1500s

Benin empire, 16th to 18th century

Brass portrait head

Benin City, ca. 1600

Benin City, 1891

Oba (king) of Edo people

Igbo-Ukwu, late 1st millennium ADburial and related features of a “priest-king,”

included 685 copper and brass wealth items and165,000 stone and glass beads

Trade was critical, which included ivory and slaves

Nubia & Ethiopia

• Kerma, Meroë, Napata, Aksum (covered during lecture on Egypt, on test 2)

• Pages 356-369; 383-390 on test 1