This volume arises out of a conference on West African archaeology held at the University of Sheffield in June 2009 and both the editor and the contributors are to be congratulated for such prompt publication. Like the conference, it samples the full range of West African archaeology, from some of the earliest traces left by humans in the region to the residues of twentieth-century villagers living on the outskirts of one of Nigeria's largest cities. An additional paper (by Rodrigues de Areia) reports briefly on plans to reopen the Dundo Museum in north-western Angola.
The papers fall into two main categories: those that report or comment on specific research findings and those that provide general overviews of topics of general concern to archaeologists and others, such as the emergence of food-production, the innovation and consequences of ironworking, and the relevance of linguistics for understanding the West African past. In framing this review, I focus on those likely to be of greatest interest to readers of this journal, while acknowledging the significance of those dealing with the Pleistocene component of Africa's past (Soriano et al.; Basell).
Of the overviews, that by Manning gives an excellent state-of-the-art summary of archaeological knowledge of the development of agriculture in West Africa, emphasising the importance of recent finds that push back pearl millet cultivation to before 2,000 BCE and show that it was cultivated deep within today's forest zone in Nigeria and Cameroon during the first millennium BCE, thereby underlining the complex pathways by which today's farming economies emerged. Pole then provides a sensitive assessment of the chronology of early ironworking, pointing out the need to evaluate with utmost care claims that this began before the mid-first millennium BCE, while acknowledging that current data are still insufficient to choose between models of independent sub-Saharan innovation or acquisition through contacts, however indirect, with North Africa or the Nile Valley. Given that so much work emphasises either chronology or the symbolism of iron smelting, his interests in considering regional variation in how iron came to replace stone and in investigating how the production, distribution, and consumption of metal was organised strike a refreshing note. More restricted in geographical scope, a third overview, by Blench, proposes a history of language changes in Nigeria that will, as he points out, require much more sustained archaeological fieldwork to help confirm.
Of the research projects presented here, Rupp's paper contributes to precisely that goal by detailing results obtained by her and her colleagues in central Nigeria. Theirs is a major project that holds out hope of significantly transforming our understanding of the Nok Culture of the first millennium BCE by providing the first archaeological context for its well-known terracotta sculptures, a task all the more urgent as looters continue to destroy sites in order to feed the international art market. As well as showing that some of the sculptures were deliberately smashed (presumably for ritual reasons), her paper considers Nok's possible links to the emergence of ironworking. Also in Nigeria, Allsworth-Jones, Horvati, and Stringer reevaluate the important site of Iwo Eleru rockshelter in south-western Nigeria (excavated by Shaw in 1965) in the light of more recent research, but the volume's other papers all relate to the second millennium CE.
Particularly thought-provoking is Casey's discussion of the archaeology of Ghana's Volta Basin, the inhabitants of which occupied geographically (and economically) intermediate positions in the exchange systems linking the Sahel with the forest zone to the south. She shows that the dearth of obvious exotic trade items at sites like Begho may reflect a combination of factors, including a primary concern to ensure that such goods reached their ultimate destinations, as well as the perishability of many of them. She also stresses the contribution to that system of local trade networks, the importance of regular caravans for local communities as suppliers and consumers of goods, and the critical (and often overlooked) role of women in provisioning such caravans and producing tradable goods, notably shea butter and pottery. Elsewhere, McDonald uses ethnographic fieldwork to assess the long-term history of stone bracelet production in Mali, Muller-Kosack explores the complexity of the ethnohistoric data that might provide a context for the stonewalled DGB sites of Cameroon, von Hellermann (not perhaps wholly convincingly) considers historical evidence that the kingdom of Benin may not always have existed in a thickly forested environment, and Orijemie et al. provide unexpected palynological evidence for a pre-European presence in Nigeria of ornamental trees of Asian/Indian Ocean origin. If Randsborg's extremely brief paper on his work in Benin offers the reader less (not least by wholly ignoring the work of Béninois archaeologists and several American-led research projects), Allsworth-Jones's own chapter on fieldwork at Adesina Oja, a village now engulfed by Ibadan, is a tour de force in employing ethnographic data to explore archaeological sites, engaging African students in the materiality of their own past and developing an archaeology of Nigeria's recent history. Overall, then, this is a most useful collection of papers and one currently without equal in its coverage of a broad swathe of West African archaeology.
