Opening the House: Transforming Identities at Kirikongo over the 1st and 2nd milleniums CE (Burkina Faso, West Africa)
Author(s): Stephen Dueppen
Year: 2015
Summary
Located at the intersection between Voltaic and Mande historical traditions, contemporary western Burkina Faso (West Africa) is a complex cultural mosaic in which local identities transcend linguistic boundaries and cultural practices, exemplifying the difficulties of employing bounded social categorizations in anthropological archaeology. The site of Kirikongo, located in this region and occupied continuously between 100 and 1700 CE provides an important case study to explore the changing nature of identities in a village community. Over time, inhabitants negotiated individual, house, village and regional identities in the context of growing and in-migrating populations at the level of the village and the greater region. This paper examines multiple dimensions of this dynamic and on-going process of identity formation in the past of Kirikongo with particular attention to durable and changing concepts of space and time. Through the analysis of multiple classes of material culture, it explores the complexity of social categories in the ancient community, as the membership of some social groups became more bounded (e.g., hereditary occupation groups) or open (e.g., houses) within the context of a general trajectory of increasingly permeable community and ethnic identities.
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Cite this Record
Opening the House: Transforming Identities at Kirikongo over the 1st and 2nd milleniums CE (Burkina Faso, West Africa). Stephen Dueppen. Presented at The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, California. 2015 ( tDAR id: 396718)
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Spatial Coverage
min long: -18.809; min lat: -38.823 ; max long: 53.262; max lat: 38.823 ;