Ancestor Shrines, Diversity, and Distributed Power in West Africa: Understanding the Strength of Flexibility and Cooperation in Sociopolitical Histories

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Essential Contributions from African to Global Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The archaeology and ethnohistory of western Burkina Faso provide myriad insights into the ways that social and political identities can be simultaneously strong, anchored, and flexible: communities can be simultaneously autonomous, connected, and engaged in collective action; and hierarchies can exist while being extensively shaped, resisted, and/or rejected by other constituencies. This paper explores these topics during three different eras of the region’s past at the site of Kirikongo and neighboring settlements in the Mouhoun Bend region, including the dispersed farming settlements of the first millennium BC and early first millennium AD, a period of egalitarian revolution in the twelfth century AD, and new collective identities after the Black Death pandemic in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Anchored by ancestor shrines within the archaeological tells on which they lived, multifamily houses flexibly negotiated and renegotiated identities at the community and regional levels as circumstances changed. Data from western Burkina Faso contributes significantly to political theory in global archaeology by showing the dynamic nature of identities whose strength lies in their flexibility.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Essential Contributions from African to Global Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36960.0