Tichitt: sociopolitical definition

Tichitt has been identified as West Africa's first large-scale complex society: a ‘chiefdom'^[1114] or even an ‘incipient state'.^[1115] Today, neither of these terms sits well with a growing Africanist scepticism towards the utility of such con­trived and imported social evolutionary categories.^[1116] Let us instead simply consider Tichitt's characteristics at its apogee (c.

As noted above, a number of settlements from Tichitt and Walata were massive, exceeding the area of many middle Niger urban sites at the apogee of the empires of Ghana and Mali. Unfortunately, there is as yet no fine­grained chronological information on exactly when and how such settle­ments expanded - we only know that most dates positively associated with such architecture fill a 600-year span: 1600-1000 bce. Evidence for Tichitt's active co-ordination of long-distance trade networks is equivocal, with beads of semi-precious stone (carnelian and amazonite) recovered in limited volumes from Tichitt sites.^[1117] Holl suggests that such items moved as tribute or prestige goods up and down Tichitt's hierarchy of settlements.^[1118] Putting these uncertainties to one side, in our present state of knowledge, the most striking aspect of Tichitt is the strong settlement hierarchy along the Tichitt and Walata escarpments, coupled with the spread of distinctive settlements and/or ceramics across Dhar Nema, Dhar Tagant, and ultimately into the middle Niger.^[1119] Also of interest, classic Tichitt's stone-walled settle­ments do not seem designed for defence, but rather to demarcate space, most probably lineage space, with some inequalities visible between the catchments of settlements and groupings of compounds within settlements.^[1120] Such settlements also often feature large enclosures without internal features - probably the base of cattle kraals. Taken together, this indicates a society with internal competition for cattle wealth and territory, perhaps gradually expanding due to seasonal needs for pasture. However, aspects of ritual are also evident, notably the concentration of hundreds of tumuli in the Dhar Tichitt escarpment, compared to barely a dozen in the extensively surveyed and prehistorically well-populated Dhar Walata.³⁵ Is this a regional difference in mortuary practice or part of a larger ideological phenomenon marking out Dhar Tichitt as an ideological centre of gravity, perhaps an ancestral locality that made it an indispensable dwelling-place for elites? Resolving such speculation will require the systematic investigation of

Tichitt's tumuli, research which should also at last clarify the social structures of the Tichitt tradition.