Case study: Jenne-jeno (Mali)
Unrecognized by the archaeological community until the late 1970s, Jenne- jeno rises 7 m high over Mali's middle Niger floodplain, a tell that would not be out of place in Mesopotamia.
Within 4 km are seventy tells in total, apparently all occupied contemporaneously; many were founded simultaneously with Jenne-jeno (within centuries of the bce/ce transition) and most were likewise abandoned at the same time, around 1400 ce.[374] The Jenne-jeno urban complex, encompassing not only the site itself but the other tells in its cluster, provided urban services and manufactures to a vast region far exceeding the city's immediate agricultural hinterland. In practice, the site was part of a dense urban landscape: in the 55,000 km2 of the seasonally inundated middle Niger floodplain there are many hundreds of similar mounds.The site of Jenne-jeno, reinforced by the urban complex, provides evidence of multiple occupations, multiple manufacturing areas, and multiple ‘identity groups' as indicated by a great diversity of contemporaneous burial practices. After some thirty-five years of controlled stratigraphic excavations at some twenty-two units spread over the 33 ha area of the site, we can model how occupational and identity diversity burgeoned from the relatively simple (although already 20 ha) community at the time of its founding in the third century bce. What subsistence and productive forces might have been behind the emergence and evolution of this clustered urbanism? While clearly arising from the complex dynamics of interactions between multiple corporate groups (i.e. self-identified groups that held real or symbolic property in common), the question of precisely how sociopolitical processes are mapped onto/create this spatial configuration remains a focus of research.
While several of the mounds in the Jenne-jeno urban complex have been excavated (albeit most with only small test units), a more comprehensive picture emerges from the systematic documentation of surface artefacts (ceramics, net weights, iron-working debris, etc.) and features (burials, house foundations, etc.) from every site in the complex.
These studies have identified numerous anomalous concentrations of certain artefacts or features, compared to the range and relative proportions at Jenne-jeno itself, that reveal numerous specialized activities concentrated at different locales.[375] While unambiguous evidence of activities focused on perishable foods and commodities is elusive in surface contexts, there is strong evidence of mutual exclusivity, or near-exclusivity, of activities such as hunting of aquatic mammals and snakes, certain styles of fishing, and weaving. The spatial focus of tasks is most apparent for iron-smelting. This is a dirty, hot, and noisy activity that also leaves a strong material signature in the form of furnace bases, tuyeres, and slag. Due in part to its transformative nature, iron-smelting has been locally associated with the production of highly dangerous occult power in the historical and modern eras, and likely during the occupation of Jenne-jeno as well. Through the Jenne-jeno sequence we see the migration of smelting from the focus site to multiple satellites.Overall, a concentration of activities continues to be the best explanation for the non-uniform, non-random distribution of surface and stratified artefacts in the Jenne-jeno urban complex. This is not surprising, as specialized quarters are a common feature of global urban settlements, although at Jenne-jeno these specialists are not only dispersed over a large area, but also maintain spatially discrete loci of both activity and residence. It is in attempting to reconstruct the political meanings of this arrangement that Jenne-jeno truly begins to challenge the standard narrative.
Susan McIntosh has analysed in detail the numerous ways in which Jenne- jeno does not fit the standard model for emerging ‘archaic' urbanism.[376] While the site and urban cluster conform to many familiar expectations (nucleation, population growth, increasing scale, internal differentiation), it is lacking many others (subsistence intensification, clear vertical stratification, public monuments).
Given our focus on the role of agriculture, we will concentrate here on the question of subsistence intensification.As described above, the positive relationship between large-scale nucleation (as we have at Jenne-jeno) and intensification is a frequent element of the standard narrative. Given the population of the urban cluster, agricultural production would of necessity increase. However, as Jenne-jeno demonstrates, expansion in an urban context need not include such markers as large infrastructural improvements, top-down hierarchical control and co-ordination, or significant production of surplus. Rather, the evidence from the site suggests diversified strategies and co-operative co-ordination among subsistence specialists combined to reliably and sustainably meet the needs of the urban population.
When the southern floodplains of the middle Niger opened up to permanent occupation in the last centuries bce, those who took advantage were mixed agriculturalists-pastoralists-fisherfolk who, millennia earlier, occupied the similar riverine/lacustrine environments of the progressively desiccated Sahara to the north. They brought with them already domesticated African rice (Oryza glaberrima) and were likely involved in its diversification into at least forty-two varieties characterized by differences in germination period and tolerance of depth of flooding.[377] In addition to rice, pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum) and sorghum (Sorghum bicolor) are in evidence throughout the 1,500-year sequence (if in a distinctively minority status). These grains were likely grown in conjunction with rice as part of a flood recession (decrue) system that took advantage of the seasonal fluctuations of the Niger and Bani rivers.[378] In addition to grains, residents likely cultivated many regionally domesticated vegetables, including melons, okra, and garden egg. While these are generally less visible in the palaeoethnobotanical record, a few seeds from a melon or bottle gourd were identified at the site.
Wild plants (many of which are managed/protected/cultivated) are a standard element of diets in the West African savanna today, a practice which appears to have been common at small villages and urban centres alike during Jenne-jeno's occupation. At the urban complex, there is clear evidence for harvesting of a wild millet (Brachiaria ramosa), and several other wild plants, including multiple grasses, that could have been collected were also identified. Interestingly, there is little evidence from excavations for the exploitation of useful trees such as baobab, jujube, and various palms, all of which are contributors to the diet today.[379]Likewise, inhabitants of the Jenne-jeno urban cluster exploited a mix of domestic and wild animals. Cattle, sheep, and goats were herded, including at least some breeds that would have moved seasonally between the inland Niger delta and surrounding regions, and chickens would have been kept close to households. In addition, residents hunted wild animals found in floodplain environments, including reedbuck, bushbuck, hartebeest, kob, and waterfowl, and fished extensively.[380]
The most interesting subsistence story of Jenne-jeno is that during the 1,500-year uninterrupted occupation, while population and settlement size grew dramatically, there is little change in this diverse, generalized subsistence economy. There is no evidence that farming of secondary grain crops, i.e. millet and sorghum, was expanded, nor that efforts were made to increase the yields of the intensively exploited Brachiaria ramosa. Overall, the contributions of wild resources appear to have remained stable over the course of the occupation (with the possible exception of kob, which does decrease in frequency). This stability is a testament to the careful management of these plants and animals, as given the increased and more nucleated population one would expect their contributions to decline in favour of agricultural production.
Most significantly, there is no evidence for experimentation with the water control and irrigation systems frequently utilized in floodplain environments. Instead, farmers employed resilient techniques well suited to the morphologically and pedologically diverse middle Niger and to high interannual variation in the timing and levels of rainfall and floods. Overall, the subsistence system was aimed at producing reliable yields in uncertain conditions rather than maximizing return.[381]As Susan McIntosh notes, at a logistical level the local methods for avoiding significant intensification during a period of rapid population growth are relatively straightforward:
For the most part, they maximized production through the development of specialized subsistence niches linked by exchange and interdependence, maintaining wild resources as a significant element of diversification within otherwise specialized economies. For flood rice cultivation, part of this diversification-within-specialization strategy was avoidance of increased labor inputs to single, fixed plots.[382]
However, the implications of these strategies for urban organization are profound and indicative of how this society was structured and how that structure reflected a long evolution of production and exchange strategies.
Clustering at the Jenne-jeno urban cluster (and in the multitude of other clustered cities and village-clusters of the middle Niger) appears to have been a solution to the problem of how different specialist corporations might maintain and display their distinct identities, while at the same time having immediate access to other providers of needed goods and services and access to those to whom they themselves provided materials. These specialist corporate groups may have been self-defining in terms of subsistence (as one sees locally today in the Nono rice farmers, the Bambara millet growers, the Bozo swamp fisherfolk, the Somono deep channel fishers, or the Peul cattle herders)[383] or in terms of craft or artisan skills.
Key to the arrangement is the development, in this highly unpredictable landscape, of the expectation of access to the goods and services of other groups in time of need.One must at the same time address the linked sociopolitical question: Who monitors or controls the exchange of those manufactures and services? In the case of the Jenne-jeno urban cluster, we appear to have an exchange system that functioned organically through the relations of reciprocity forged among corporate groups. If corporate groups were defined unambiguously, along with expectations and rules of reciprocity, including consequences if the rules were transgressed, the urban system would not have required a vertically hierarchical control structure - which in fact we do not see. Rather, corporate ownership of individual mounds by members of an occupationally defined or kin group is established by the archaeological data indicating near-exclusivity of occupational debris at each of the satellite sites. Did risk-management ‘cause' this mixed and flexible subsistence, that in turn ‘caused' this unusual clustered urbanism? Or did a tolerant acceptance of others (defined by their subsistence and artisanal pursuits) ‘cause' a robust risk-sharing landscape, ‘accelerated' by the flooding of displaced Saharans into the floodplain of the middle Niger? At this stage in our research it is impossible to untangle causation from correlation to any convincing degree. What is clear is that this intertwined system of dependency did not require the production of significant agricultural surplus, but rather maximized reciprocal relationships within the context of a heterarchically organized urban centre.