Archaeological Survey and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in African Archaeology: Perspectives from the Niger Valley, Benin

Summary

The Niger River Valley in the north of the Republic of Benin, West Africa, has abundant archaeology that until recently has been under researched. During a systematic field survey carried out for my doctoral research as part of the European Research Council-funded Crossroads of Empires project led by Prof Anne Haour, over 300 new archaeological sites were discovered and 50,000 material culture objects recorded. This paper will discuss the methodology used to systematically survey the landscape of this region using field walking and satellite imagery and how the results were integrated within a GIS, creating the most archaeologically comprehensive map of the area ever made. The preliminary results of this research demonstrate that settlement favoured areas close to perennial and ephemeral fluvial systems. Furthermore, the spatial distribution of the sites discovered displayed strong evidence of spatial clustering, which has been shown in other West African contexts to be indicative of early urbanisation – however this may also be evidence of the slow destruction and segmentation of mounded sites.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20168