New Radiocarbon Dates for Northern and Western Africa

Abstract

Several significant trends are noted in the recent radiocarbon dates from North and West Africa. The early Khartoum Neolithic dates from Nabta Playa of the seventh millennium B.C. and the thermoluminescence dates from the Badarian of the sixth millennium, would appear to have redressed the balance for the time being in favour of the Nile Valley in the argument as to whether agriculture in the Nile Valley predates that in the Sahara. A more cautious approach might be to say that these dates emphasize the need for far more securely dated evidence before conclusions are drawn on this complicated, and often emotional, problem. The presence of sorghum in the first quarter of the first millennium A.D. at Jebel et Tomat provides the earliest direct evidence for this key African agricultural staple. Many interesting very late Stone Age dates have come from West Africa and indicate the contemporaneity of stone and iron using communities throughout the first millennium A.D. in certain remote areas. The dates of the Senegambia megaliths are clearly falling within the first millennium A.D. Dates for iron working in both Nigeria and Ghana are confirming that iron technology was well established by the first half of the first millennium A.D. The dates from Ife and elsewhere in Nigeria are clearly indicating that the ‘classic’ terracotta period, and also the pottery pavements, belong to the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. The state of research in North and West Africa reflects the well-known, but too often neglected, archaeological truism that researchers find what they are looking for and rarely more; the Iron Age emphasis in West Africa, and the Paleolithic-Epipaleolithic concentration in the francophone lands. Presumed general trends in these areas, particularly conclusions comparing development in North and West Africa, should be examined carefully for underlying sampling biases of an ideological as well as of a geographical nature.