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7
Lost in Tradition, Found in Transition

Scales of Indigenous History in Siin, Senegal
François G. Richard
Historical writing in Senegambia has generally been struc-

tured around a series of temporal and geographic distinctions: between oral,
written, and material sources; between prehistory, protohistory, and history;
between local tradition and global transformation; and so forth. These demar-
cations are artifacts of colonial modernity that assign different valences to peo-
ples and places, and their position in relation to world history—valences that
in turn can be deployed in discourse to mark social difference, shape particular
imaginaries of belonging and exclusion, and justify or contest structures of
inequality. For example, scholarly narratives have often portrayed the Serer of
Siin (in Senegal) as a population of conservative peasants impervious to the
work of change and development—a perspective that took shape during the
Copyright © 2012. University of Arizona Press. All rights reserved.
colonial period, but whose echoes still resonate in contemporary Senegal.

In keeping with the objectives outlined by Hart et al. in their Introduc-
tion, this chapter seeks to pursue two broad lines of argument: (1) examine the
kinds of elisions that have entered the writing of Senegambia’s Atlantic past;
and (2) propose analytical strategies that can help to address these absences
and craft a richer sense of Indigenous histories on the continent. More spe-
cifically, a combined look at oral, documentary, and archaeological archives
would suggest that conventional portrayals of Siin’s history tend to overlook
the long and dynamic record of engagement tying local rural communities to
larger spheres of social, political, and economic interactions. Viewed from a
perspective attentive to the play of scale and materiality, Siin’s archaeological
landscapes reveal multiple planes of social experience that qualify our under-
standing of regional history and political diversity in Senegambia. Beyond
revisiting some key tenets of Senegal’s historiography, Siin’s material past
also holds important potential for the development of alternative, and more
132
Decolonizing Indigenous Histories : Exploring Prehistoric/Colonial Transitions in Archaeology, edited by Maxine Oland, et al.,
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Indigenous History in Siin, Senegal 133
inclusive, histories of the nation. Lastly, seen against the broader corpus of
studies of colonial engagements worldwide (including analyses compiled in
this volume), material histories from the Siin and other regions in Africa
seem to underscore the relevance of African experiences in comparative con-
versations about Indigenous entanglements with global political economy. In
the same way that case studies from North America have greatly influenced
archaeological research on Atlantic Africa, Africanist research might also be
poised to contribute empirical inspiration, orientations, and perspectives to
the archaeology of colonial encounters elsewhere.
Lost in Tradition: Uneven Perspectives on the

Senegambian Past
The advent of Atlantic contacts in Senegambia is often regarded as a defining

episode, which dramatically altered the course of local pasts and their subse-
quent futures. A powerful historical metaphor, the Atlantic moment has also
organized regional historiography, forming an indelible dividing line across
narratives of Senegambian history. Thus, the few centuries that preceded the
landing of Portuguese caravels in 1444 are generally consigned to the realm of
“protohistory,” a broad and blurry period marked by widespread state forma-
tion, massive migrations, the expansion of Islam, and emergence of modern
ethnic identities. That this stretch of regional history is glimpsed primarily
through the filter of oral memory (and Iron Age vestiges, to a lesser extent)
endows it with particular temporal properties that demarcate it from later his-
tory, which enjoys sharper resolution thanks to a comparatively richer record

of evidence. Buoyed by a rising volume of written documents, the “Atlantic
era” seems to coincide with an acceleration of time, resolutely pushing the
region into “event” and “structural” history. Although they created new com-
mercial outlets for African populations (Curtin 1975; Searing 1993), “Atlantic
encounters” have generally been equated with the subjection of Senegambia
to an expanding capitalist economy, resulting in the rise of predatory states,
explosion of social violence and oppression, and loss of political and economic
autonomy (Barry 1998). Whether these changes are traced back to the Atlan-
tic period per se or the onset of formal colonialism in the 1850s, few would
disagree that the past four hundred years of Senegalese history have witnessed
dramatic reconfigurations in local social, economic, and political conditions.
While panoramic in scope, there is little doubt that these scenarios capture
a certain historical reality. For one, they reflect, in broad brushstrokes, the core
experiences of those larger and better-documented kingdoms (Kajoor, Fuuta
134 François G. Richard
Toro, Saalum) that were centrally involved in Atlantic commerce (Klein 1992).
By extension, these general patterns also hold some validity for Senegambia as
a whole. However, notwithstanding their usefulness, synthetic narratives have
also rested, consciously or not, on a now disputed form of bifurcated thinking
(Fabian 1983; Trouillot 2003), which presupposes different qualities of time
and culture between colonial history and what came before, different capaci-
ties for agency between Africa and Europe, and different perceptions about the
reliability of various sources. Moreover, in narrowing the space of Senegalese
history to the experiences of large kingdoms and dominant economic actors,
these perspectives have not always done justice to the complex bundle of tra-
jectories that constituted Atlantic Senegambia, downplaying, for instance, the
contributions of peripheral polities or decentralized societies (Klein 2001).
Responding to these difficulties, recent historical scholarship has under-
scored the need to suture the various divides fracturing portrayals of the regional
past. Some authors have worked on closing the Atlantic caesura by articulat-
ing long-term analyses of Senegambian political economy (Boulègue 1987;
Brooks 1993; Diouf 2001), while others have begun to attend to smaller
coastal societies in their engagements with Atlantic and colonial worlds (Baum
1999; Galvan 2004; Hawthorne 2003).1 This research has greatly enriched
our understanding of Indigenous social landscapes in the past 600 years. At
the same time, available sources rarely permit to fully historicize local cultural
practices, and if recent historical accounts often paint detailed and dynamic
portraits of political and economic changes, those generally unfold on a stable
backdrop of social traditions inherited from a fons et origo of precolonial culture
(but see Baum 1999; Hawthorne 2003; Shaw 2002).
The Siin, a small province in west-central Senegal, has not been immune
to these historical tensions (Figure 7.1). While today in fast demographic
transition, the area has historically been occupied by the Serer, a minority
ethnic group perceived as one of the most autochthonous populations of
Senegal (Figure 7.2).2 The Serer feature centrally in narratives of Senegal’s
pre-European-contact past, where they are routinely linked to Iron Age
archaeological vestiges and associated with seminal episodes of social trans-
formation in northern Senegal (Martin and Becker 1974). However, with
the advent of the Atlantic economy and reorientation of Senegal’s politi-
cal geography around bigger and (nominally) Muslim polities to the north
and east, the Siin gradually fades out of discussions of the national past.
This peripheralization further intensified during the colonial era, when Serer
populations became increasingly portrayed by French observers as timeless
peasants standing in the way of progress and modernization—a perspective
that arguably has quietly endured into postcolonial public culture.
Figure 7.1. Precolonial kingdoms of northern Senegambia (c. 1850).
In many ways, interpretive and epistemological tensions over the making

of the Siin’s history provide a familiar illustration of the embeddedness of
Indigenous pasts in the politics and preoccupations of colonial and postcolo-
nial Africa (Schmidt 2006; Stahl 2001; Trouillot 1995). Taking stock of these
concerns, this chapter seeks to revisit questions of tradition in the Siin, as they
relate to matters of historical transitions in Senegal’s past (cf. Pauketat 2001).
Building on recent archaeological research, which has convincingly shown the
central role of object worlds in processes of colonial encounters (e.g., Dawdy
2008; Hall and Silliman 2006; Jordan 2008; Lightfoot et al. 1998; Stahl 2002;
Stein 2005; Voss 2008), it suggests that stale concepts of tradition and transi-
tion can be usefully recrafted in light of current discussions of material practice
and materiality (Buchli 2002; Meskell 2004; Miller 2005; Tilley 2005). More
specifically, I wish to expand on these conversations and argue that a perspec-
tive attentive to the constitution of scale—that is, how social relations are
expressed and work through time, space, and matter—can bring into sharper
relief different temporalities and materialities of experience, and produce more
sensitive readings of historicity in past African societies (see Lucas 2005, for
a more general argument about articulating different experiences of time and
Figure 7.2. West-Central Senegal: Kingdoms and ethnic groups in the mid-nineteenth
century.
history in the past). With this framework in mind, I go on to examine how

ongoing archaeological research conducted in the Siin (Richard 2007) can be
combined with other sources to reveal “alternative histories” (Schmidt and
Patterson 1995) that complicate narratives of change and global engagement
in the region. Navigating between sources and levels of cultural expression
can help to critically offset the partialities of historical discourses or question
the assumptions underwriting conventional images of the past. This, in turn,
becomes a first step toward loosening our constructions of Indigenous history
from the moorings of colonial representations, while forcing greater awareness
of their consequences in the postcolonial present (Richard 2009).
Jumping Scales: Notes on Materiality, Historicity,

Transitions
Scale has been a remarkably generative concept in archaeology in the past

twenty years or so. Sensitivity to scale has proved particularly useful in study-
ing the interlocking of different levels of political, economic, and cultural
forces, of local objects and global processes, most notably in times of political
change or contexts associated with the emergence of the modern world (Crum-
ley and Marquardt 1987; Hall 2000; Hall and Silliman 2006; Marquardt
1992; O’Donovan 2002; Orser 1996). Beyond the ability to accommodate
multiple levels of spatial relations, from the artifact to global networks, mul-
tiscalar approaches have also permitted a sounder appreciation of time depth,
especially the relevance of perspectives of the long term in making sense of

given historical situations (Lightfoot 1995; Rubertone 2000; Silliman 2005).
Scale is often understood as a “perspective” or “level of analysis” and thus
as dependent on the analyst; yet scale is also a social and historical product,
both an effect of particular sets of social relations and a particular extension in
time and space that delimits how far social forces will carry and demarcates
the domain of their effectiveness (Harvey 1996; Lefèbvre 1997; Marston 2000;
Massey 2006; Ollman 1993; Sheppard and McMaster 2004; Smith 1990,
1996). In this sense, scale is not simply a matter of time or space, of defining
the unit of analysis one wishes to study (e.g., Crumley and Marquardt 1987;
Marquardt 1992). Rather, it is a conflation of both geography and temporality,
which recognizes that human actions take different forms in time and space,
that they operate in and through socially constructed arenas, and that their
effects are felt differently across various fields of relations. Moreover, because
scale is a sociohistorical production, and because space and time are culturally
defined, scale is also about perception and imagination. To be successful, social
projects must conjure a sense of their scope, applicability, and efficacy, delim-
iting their domain of operation and how far their effects will travel in time
and space (Tsing 2004:57–58). Human activities are thus “scale-making”
projects: they necessitate particular imaginings of the contours of action and
relations; these framings, in turn, have tangible consequences for social prac-
tice, even as they are (re)shaped in the course of social dealings. Because of the
implication of time and space in social efficacy, scales also presume a range of
moral attitudes and sensibilities, imparting particular values to spatio-temporal
distance or proximity, to foreignness and indigeneity, to locality and “global-
ity,” to particular spheres of belonging (home, village, city, region, nation,

etc.) and the diverse fields of sociality they occupy (Moore 2005; Munn 1986).
In this light, the making of scale is a profoundly political process, one in which
different, competing framings of the social world are contested, negotiated,
or coexistent, depending on shifting coordinates of power. For a taste of the
“politics of scale” (Smith 1992) and its concrete repercussions, one need only
think of how distance in time (or relationship to history and modernity) is
often materialized as position in space, as when peripheries or the “Global
South” are portrayed as the terrain of stalled development. Or about how the
spatialization of cultural difference also enfolds commentaries on the future of
“identity,” as manifested in discourses of anxiety and paranoia in and around
“borders” (Fabian 1983; Mignolo 2000). Tensions in the production of scale
are not just rhetorical or discursive; ambiguities can result as localities get
caught in the tide of competing social processes or political projects, as cul-
tural understandings lag behind or fail to make sense of historical change,
or when contradictions arise between the perceived scope of actions and their
actual effects. Tensions, in this instance, may be objectified in materialities,
say, in the advent of transformations within particular categories of objects, in
discrepant patterns across related assemblages, or in different material spheres
showing different rates of change.3
Clearly, it would take more than a short essay to unravel—let alone resolve—
the conceptual, practical, and political complexities of scale, as defined here.
For the purpose of this essay, I just wish to examine some possibilities that
an expanded concept of scale offers us for thinking through materiality and
temporality in past African settings, and its recuperative implications for the
study of historicity outside of categories of colonial knowledge.
The challenges presented by a more encompassing definition of scale lie in
determining the nature of the relationship between different fields of economic,
political, and moral forces present in any given context, say, how different
materialities articulate, or how archaeological contexts (feature, structure, com-
pound, site, hamlet, settlement landscape, etc.) may embody contradictions
created by the convergence of multiple social projects, with different material
extensions in time and space. In situations of African cultural encounters, for
instance, it is not uncommon to find materialities of the short run imbricated
within logics of longer duration, or indeed, material patterns unfolding along
different paths and at different tempos, in response to a similar set of forces.
In other words, understanding African historicities at the cusp of historical
encounters rests on our ability not simply to track change and continuity in
material assemblages, but retrieve different qualities and rhythms of change
(reversal, interruption, acceleration, etc.) and continuity (intensification, cyclic-
ity, etc.), their different expressions in time and space, and how and why par-
ticular material trajectories emerge while others fade into oblivion.4
To negotiate these “awkward scales” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2003) and
set object worlds in historical motion, we must be able to: (1) discern the lay-
ered social fields expressed in material culture, that is, to multiply our angles
of analysis on different archaeological manifestations; and (2) move between
and across these different scales in search of different kinds of resemblances
and ruptures. African historicities (Bayart 1993; Mbembe 2001)—Indigenous
communities’ temporal rhythms, their capacity for agency, their negotiation
of external processes, internal constraints, and evolving possibilities—can
be read off these transitions. Transitions, here, no longer refer to lockstep
changes across arbitrary thresholds of time, culture, or technology, but to
the exploration of variation between and within different levels/durations
of materiality pieced together from archaeological and documentary records
(cf. Lucas 2005). That our “dialectics of scale” meets a “dialectics of sources”
is important: recognizing that materiality is socially, politically, and mor-

ally embedded implies that nonartifactual sources (when available) may well
contain critical insights into material relations and circulations, and how
social projects were differently valued, imagined, and understood. Textual
documents may offer short-term snapshots of local arrangements and cultural
practices, just as oral traditions may encode long-term moral commentar-
ies on social order. These, in turn, can be confronted with other evidential
media to multiply our vantage points on particular material realities—their
changing scales—while checking different perspectives on the past to enrich
our portrayals of local histories and engagement with broader spheres of rela-
tions. These passages between different scales of material expression, and
the social fields that pulsed through them, afford glimpses of Indigenous
histories outside of the conceptual repertoire of colonial modernity.5 In this
respect, it can perhaps be argued that African pasts can be found, rather than
lost, in transitions.
Let us now turn to the Siin and briefly examine how an attention to scale
may help us to reevaluate local pasts and the historical experience of local
communities in the long term. Using settlement landscapes and artifact dis-
tributions (Richard 2007), I will show how the materialities produced across
the imaginary divide between pre- and post-European-contact Senegambia
suggest for coastal societies such as the Siin historical dynamics that are very
different from those portrayed in conventional history.
Found in Transition? Shades of Historicity in the

Siin Province
Historians of Senegambia have sometimes identified Portuguese navigations

as the first moment of colonization, chaining African societies to an irrevers-
ible process of dependence on outside markets that accelerated over time and
culminated in the advent of colonialism and global capitalist exploitation
(Barry 1998). Regional decadence is best exemplified by the rise of central-
ized predatory monarchies and their slave warriors, whose meteoric success
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rested on vampirizing African
villagers, ransacking the countryside, and compromising productive forces,
social stability, and political security in their hunger for Atlantic weapons
and luxuries. Somewhat puzzlingly, as remarked above, these accounts also
depict local cultural traditions as relatively immune to the turbulent back-
ground of Atlantic forces. Incongruities aside, these storylines converge
on one point: they grant little capacity for action to local constituencies,
outsourcing instead historical agency either to the turbulent play of external

factors or to the placid endurance of culture.
Similar observations apply to the Siin. Thus, the familiar trope of the
“predatory state” has been liberally used to describe the Siin kingdom during
the Atlantic era, with limited regard for the cultural logics of power that may
have held sway in the region. While acknowledging the volatility of politics
in Atlantic Senegal, historical accounts have nevertheless imagined the Siin
as the terrain of a homogeneous ethnic culture left largely intact until the
full conversion of the region to peanut cash-cropping during the colonial era
(Lericollais 1972; Pélissier 1966). Of course, these views trace their pedigree
to the notebooks of colonial ethnographers. Today still, as colonial images
have outlived their contexts of origination, some of their assumptions con-
tinue to infuse understandings of history, politics and culture, and practices
of scholarship in postindependence Senegal. Even the most sensitive analyses
of the effects of global and colonial forces on the Siin (Klein 1968, 1979;
Mbodj 1978) have struggled with the uneasy tendency to portray the region
as uniquely bound to “traditional lifeways” (cf. Galvan 2004). In this light,
if the key historical agencies dominating narratives of Senegambian history
have been world capitalism and centralized states, then in the Siin a third
one has been Tradition, in its endless ability to contain (or absorb) the social
instability caused by the European presence and greedy political elites.
Viewed from the standpoint of past materiality, however, regional histori-
cal transcripts show a far more complex and ambiguous reality. Attention to
different levels of material culture reveals a cascade of material tempos and
transformations, intersecting at some junctures, yet affecting different social
spheres in different fashion. As would be expected, artifact traditions do

not docilely follow the punctuated progression suggested by Iron Age (pre-
European)/Atlantic/colonial periodizations. These temporal watersheds, for
instance, are amply bypassed by ceramic traditions, which roughly fall into
four periods for the second millennium AD (ca. 1000–1400s, 1400s–1700s,
eighteenth–nineteenth century, and late nineteenth century–twentieth cen-
tury). These phases blur considerably at their borders, with a variety of sty-
listic traits and morphological attributes extending across period-bound
assemblages, and considerable regional and temporal variations within them
(Richard 2007:ch. 8; also Liebmann and Stahl, this volume, on chronological
phases). By contrast, fishing equipment retrieved at coastal locales and cer-
tain aspects of textile production appear to show little transformation prior
to the twentieth century (something supported by documentary and picto-
rial glimpses between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries), suggesting
that different spheres of economy and technology did not evenly weather and
respond to the effects of “global encounters” (Richard 2007:ch. 9). These sca-
lar discontinuities, in turn, prompt critical questions about the cultural and
practical reasons underlying different choices and courses of action in the face
of an expanding political economy. By the same token, they also challenge
the convictions that the passage to the Atlantic economy initiated a spiral of
economic devolution, announcing the defeat of local industries by imported
goods, and dependence of African lives on outside products and markets over
which they had no control.
The difficulty with this thesis is that, archaeologically, the earliest imprints
of Atlantic exchanges in the Siin do not surface until the eighteenth century,
and thus after roughly 250 years of sustained commercial engagements with
coastal societies. Temporal lags, of course, are commonly observed in situ-
ations of historical encounters: discrepancies frequently occur between the
circulation of goods/ideas and their materialization in local archaeological
fabrics; the reception or use of imported commodities does not always trans-
late into immediate impact on local production and consumption practices;
in many parts of Africa, imported products penetrated deep into the interior,
and thus foreign cultural ideas and influences often preceded the physical
presence of Europeans; or conversely, the arrival of Europeans does not nec-
essarily coincide with abrupt changes in material practices (DeCorse 2001;
Stahl 2001; Thiaw 1999, 2008). In the Siin, these lags rest in part on the
fact that early commercial inventories often included “perishable products”
that played a vital role in coastal commercial circuits (slaves, cotton cloth,
and kola, in return for ivory, hides, and other raw materials) but are invisible
in the ground. To a certain extent, written documents offer scattered but
informative insights on these less visible products and the exchange logics in
which they were embedded (de Moraes 1973). Yet textual accounts also men-
tion the rampant circulation of very concrete and very enduring trade goods,
such as iron bars, beads, metal objects, and so forth, and the widespread popu-
larity they enjoyed among elites, and to a lesser extent, less affluent segments
of the population (Brooks 1993; Curtin 1975; Searing 1993). Why is it, then,
that survey and excavations across a variety of socioeconomic contexts have
yielded no consistent signs of European material presence until the eighteenth
century? While questions of preservation and site formation process inevitably
come to the fore, these temporal lags raise important realizations: (1) despite
impressive advances in material culture theory, we are still altogether unsure
of what exactly is condensed in archaeological assemblages—what dimensions/
processes of past social life they actually embody; and (2) the impact of world
capitalism has proved a good deal more ambiguous than many historians have
accounted for.
Transformations in the built landscape suggest likewise, while revealing

a complex matrix of temporal dynamics. In the first half of the second mil-
lennium AD, which is depicted in oral traditions as a period of vast regional
migrations, ethnogenesis, and kingdom formation (Becker and Martin 1972;
Gravrand 1983; Sarr 1986–87), human occupations tend to cluster on the
littoral and along tidal channels, with limited extensions into the interior.
The settlement landscape in the Siin consisted largely of small-scale, shifting,
undifferentiated communities leaving faint archaeological traces. Juxtaposed
against this picture of ambient mobility and dispersed habitat, however, one
also finds large residential concentrations on the coast, with earlier roots into
the first millennium AD. These contrastive modes of settlement suggest the
coexistence of different social projects, ways of inhabiting the landscape, log-
ics of organization, and community histories. This complex cultural topog-
raphy could well reflect the influence of human movements and endogenous
forces of fission/fusion, although material assemblages provide little support
for outside migration.
Around CE 1400, human densities underwent a sharp decline along the
coast, although prominent village remains are still found in the vicinity of
Atlantic trading posts such as Joal. Concurrently, the social habitat seems to
have reoriented toward the Siin heartland. The region also appears to have
experienced considerable demographic growth, as indicated by a dramatic
increase in number of habitation sites between ca. 1500 and the early 1700s.
These sites are often larger and denser than earlier settlements and begin
to be occupied for longer periods of time, which signals new social invest-
ments in place. It is possible that these changes are connected to what oral
traditions describe as a recentering of the village landscape prompted by the

inland movement of the kingdom’s political center in the fifteenth century
(Diouf 1972; Gravrand 1983), and the rise of Atlantic exchanges. At the
same time, the Siin’s social geography also features continuities with earlier
times, manifested by the absence of spatial stratification or clear settlement
hierarchy, despite documented evidence that the Siin kingdom was already in
place by that time (Boulègue 1987; de Moraes 1993–98).
By the eighteenth century, villages in the Siin experienced another sharp
increase in site numbers. These settlements, however, are smaller on average
(there are some exceptions), and more dispersed and ephemeral than their pre-
decessors. This scattered landscape captures the considerable displacement/
relocation of given villages over time, whose movements are recorded in
village traditions (Becker et al. 1991) and traceable across regional surface
remains. It is likely that this more constellated residential landscape emerged
Figure 7.3. Pecc Waagaan site (S6C), Unit 1: Feasting pit feature.
in part as a reaction to the rise of social instability, crises of production, and

cycles of ecological deterioration in Senegal during the 1700s (Becker 1986).
This suggests a more flexible strategy of response to political violence than
the massive depopulation and generalized village desertion described by cer-
tain authors (Diop 1997). More subtly, we observe the weaving together of
old and new spatial elements—combining a long-term logic of mobility and
dispersal with smaller, more transient settlements—to form a more reactive
and fluid spatial order. More interestingly, these changes in settlement pat-
terns suggest that the vast, cloudlike residential nebulae that later colonial
ethnographers saw as a long-term attribute of tradition in the Siin (Reynier
1933; Rousseau 1928) might instead be born of relatively recent reconfigura-
tions in Senegambian political maps during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. By extension, it is quite possible that other social institutions long
associated with the repertoire of age-old Serer tradition and closely enmeshed
with these new spatialities—such as Serer systems of land tenure and prop-
erty inheritance, organization of production and labor, agro-pastoral manage-
ment, and periodic village relocation (Gastellu 1981; Pélissier 1966)—also
crystallized during this period. It is also interesting to note that some of the
regional differences ethnographically observed in village structure (Martin
et al. 1980:65–67)—between more compact, agglomerated, and populated
coastal settlements and more diffuse hinterland ones—may reflect intensifi-
cations and accentuations of longer-term dispositions (already present in the
early second millennium) during the Atlantic era.
Geographic differences in materiality and spatiality within the Siin may
also have a story to tell about political organization. It is striking that, while
the Siin is frequently described as a highly centralized kingdom, its mate-

rial landscapes present few if any signatures of political concentration, spa-
tial hierarchy, or economic accumulation. The maintenance of a relatively
undifferentiated social habitat, with consistent artifact inventories across the
region, invokes the possibility that more subtle power arrangements might
have been at play. Similar ambiguity carries over to textual archives, which
quietly document fluctuations in political power depending on contingen-
cies of leadership, regional warfare, economic conditions, and internal poli-
tics. While historically royal authority and its slave warriors appear to have
kept a tight grip over the capital and vicinity, documentary and ethnographic
sources intimate that such control did not always extend to more distant or
peripheral parts of the kingdom. In effect, a number of historical observers
indicate that coastal provinces may have enjoyed varying degrees of autonomy,
maybe even quasi-independence, at various points between the seventeenth
and nineteenth centuries (Richard 2007:388). Likewise, the Mbayar, an iso-

lated area along the kingdom’s northern border, appears to have presented
considerable control over its historical destiny, by virtue of its interstitial
position between rival polities and its ability to side with one or the other
depending on its interests (Gastellu 1976).
While sensitive to shifts in political economy, these cycles of contraction/
expansion in state sovereignty appear to speak quite centrally to the “ambig-
uous” political foundations of the Siin kingdom during the Atlantic era.
Although attempts to concentrate authority and resources in the hands of the
monarch and his administration were real enough, they nevertheless coexisted
with multiple and competing spheres of power relations, whose legitimacy
and efficacy varied considerably in time and space. This complex architec-
ture of forces invested the political field with unique dynamism; rather than
opposite projects, centralized rule and local autonomy were intimately linked
and actively involved in (re)shaping the contours of state rule and political
power. Because effective governance depended in part on a grassroots net-
work of village notables, lineage elders, rain-priests, and spiritual beings—
all spatially anchored in a variety of localities—it is possible that the spatial
production of power in the Siin did not involve large-scale reengineering of
landscape. What may have been at play instead is a less atmospheric regime
of spatial sovereignty working through people, social practices, and cultural
institutions. These spatial mediations were sometimes coercive, in the case of
military interventions, for instance, or unfolded in more conciliatory fashion,
when they involved the performance of appropriate rituals by the king or
local specialists interceding with the ancestral realm in favor of the kingdom.
The endurance of relatively unstratified spatialities throughout the Atlantic

era may indeed indicate that royal power had to work through, or parallel
to, local structures and spatial forms, even as the Siin monarchies grew more
centralized during the nineteenth century (Richard n.d.).
Oblique allusions to alternative power arrangements surface in certain
strands of oral traditions that describe the Siin kingdom as born of a delicate
architecture of mutual dependence, compromise, and power-sharing between
aristocrats, commoners, and slaves, the three key constituents of Siin society
(Becker and Martin 1972; Diagne 1965; Galvan 2004). Other hints can be
found in funerary hymns, oral poetry, and some of the cultivation songs still
sung today in fields at the time of sowing. While dynastic memory tends to
glorify the achievements of aristocratic or military elites (e.g., Senghor 1990),
these poetic songs idolize the bravery of the common man, triumphing over
the forces of nature through the arduous work of cultivation and thus engaging
in the noblest act of social production (Faye 2005, 2008). Surely, the collapse
Table 7.1. Artifact classes in Siin: Production and exchange practices over the past
2,000 years.
of space and time into particular narrative conventions discourages literal

acceptance of oral poetry as straightforward history; more productively, oral
memory can be read as palimpsests that braid events and processes assembled
from scrambled historical moments into a form of moral imagination (Shaw

2002). In this regard, these accounts provide difficult but potentially fertile
vantages on what I referred to above as the perceptual or moral dimension of
scale and thus can supplement our dialectical investigations.
On this backdrop of dynamic political realignments, imported commodi-
ties gradually made their way into local systems of objects, unevenly com-
bining with local regimes of production, consumption, and valuation. Some
domains of materiality, such as those nested in commercial textile and iron
production, were casualties of the easy access to cheap manufactures. Others
(ceramic manufacture, pipe smoking) experienced minor alterations, and
other forms of craftsmanship (bead making) actually emerged during the
period (Richard 2007:ch. 9) (Table 7.1). These different rhythms of mate-
rial change raise pointed questions about the idea of a homogeneous force of
global modernity implacably leveling the cultural terrains of non-European
others and stifling their capacity for production. That spheres of material
culture, bodies, and politics of valuation mutated at different rates and differ-
ent times, spinning different trajectories of experience, underlines the need
for situated histories of practice grounded in object worlds (Richard 2010a;
Stahl 2002).
Despite the region’s growing dependence on global market relations, one
of the immediate effects of Atlantic commerce was the rapid democratization
of exchange in the Siin, as peasants were introduced to wider worlds of con-
sumption unhampered by the yoke of political elites and sumptuary regula-
tions. These transformations debuted quite early in the eighteenth century,
as the regional political economy gradually veered away from a central reli-
ance on human commodities to one on foodstuffs and provisioning, products
that fell outside of the realm of aristocratic authority and could be purchased
directly from rural producers.
Still, despite continued documentary references to the popularity of trade
imports during the Atlantic era, foreign goods do not reach substantial vis-
ibility in local archaeological assemblages until the second half of the nine-
teenth century. There, the primacy of liquor bottles underscores the role of
alcohol in processes of colonial negotiation. While the influx of trade liquor
often had tragic repercussions, it also fostered inventive recontextualizations
of different kinds of alcohols into local repertoires of distinction. Again, mov-
ing from the panoramic scale of the region to the more singular vantage of the
site—a feasting pit feature excavated in the late nineteenth-century capital of
Ndiongolor, in this instance (Figure 7.3)—material assemblages suggest that
aristocrats may have attempted to control the circulation and consumption of
wine, and to secure its association with political elites through the performance
of commensal ritual ceremonies (Richard 2010a). Shifting to yet another scale,

oral memory this time, it is interesting to note that certain oral narratives
identify wine (a foreign product) as being absolutely essential to the repro-
duction of Indigenous political offices and institutions, without which the
relevant rites of passage could not be effected. Again here the politics of dif-
ference are also politics of scale, whose moral valences are heavily objectified
in material landscapes.
Decolonizing Archaeological Knowledge?

Scale, Politics, History
Studying Indigenous pasts is seldom an easy task. It is often complicated by a

lack or partiality of archives and the ideological fields in which they were pro-
duced and used. This incompleteness is not simply the product of historical
forces of edition, retention, and erasure, but also a refraction of the “historical
process” itself. Africa’s past is haunted by the specter of those innumerable
social strategies lost to the graveyard of global encounters. While a widening
political economic field introduced new possibilities, it also foreclosed oth-
ers and effaced still more that have left no presence in the ethnographic or
historic records (Stahl 2004). When evidence does exist, the way in which
it is filtered and mobilized provides additional challenges of interpretation.
Many of the histories we seek to revisit have deep roots in the world of colo-
nial discourse. Parsing ideology from history is delicate not only because they
inhabit each other, but also because the conceptual toolkits we employ often
channel their own partialities (Stahl, this volume). These may often work
against the best-intentioned attempts at recuperating or approximating
archaeological histories sensitive to the complex nature of Indigenous experi-
ences. Lastly, Indigenous pasts are always written in the present, and thus
critically implicated in the politics of knowledge and identity. As such, they
inevitably become arenas or resources for the contestation of memory, dig-
nity, and power among different constituencies, as well as a critical ground
for the articulation of collective subjectivities in the present.
In this chapter, I have used my work in Senegal to examine a few questions
and problems common to archaeologists committed to the study of Indige-
nous pasts in postcolonial settings, especially in Africa. Drawing on material
repertoires from the Siin province, I have tried to show that archaeology can
combine with oral and textual archives to reveal alternative insights on dif-
ferent levels of local histories and their linkages to regional and global politi-
cal economic fields, or, more humbly, to raise questions about the silences
that have shrouded local pasts as they have been absorbed in broader colonial,
national, and postcolonial narratives of Senegalese history.
In the case of the Siin, transformations in social landscapes reveal a suite
of material tempos and tensions that imply significant departures from classic
historiography (see also Jordan 2008, for striking parallels in the eighteenth-
century Iroquois country). While in its infancy, the historical archaeology
of the Siin finds little support for straightforward, long-term permanences
between the “ethnographic past” of the region and more remote periods.
Concurrently, although the violent impact of the Atlantic era cannot be
doubted, the material record strongly challenges wholesale scenarios of cata-
strophic devolution. Instead, it suggests that the relationships between con-
tinuity and change, between locality and global forces, between Europe and
its “others” cannot be reduced to a model of historical determination that
consigns the capacity to make history to western agencies. A close look at
long-term materialities shows that African communities combined tradition
and innovation to negotiate their changing worlds, and that ways of doing
and thinking did not move at a uniform rate.
In the end, African societies have always been historical, unfolding in dia-
logue with processes of world history (Mitchell 2005). Recognizing the syn-
copated qualities of African pasts, their uneven articulations with a triad of
distant peoples, ideas, and places, offers the possibility for writing Indigenous
histories that fetishize neither the particularity of localities nor the certainties
of global modernity. Such a perspective also invites the possibility of more
inclusive histories at other scales. For instance, a consideration of the Siin’s
history underscores the need to shore up portraits of the Senegalese past with
alternative visions experienced and written on the nation’s margins. Doing so
can help to restore a sense of the plural trajectories that have shaped the con-
tours of Senegambian history over time yet get edited out of public culture
and national imaginations.
Arguments such as the one presented here, of course, generate their own
ambiguities—not the least of which with descendants of the communities
whose past we seek to understand (Smith 1999). Calling for more demo-
cratic Indigenous histories raises a pair of thorny questions: Do “Natives”
need “History”? And on what terms? The problem here stems partly from
the fact that “decolonizing” perspectives on the past presuppose an ethical
and political enterprise that seeks to critically destabilize metanarratives of
history and yet, in its very claim to do so, presumes a certain stability or
superiority for its own standpoint on the past and present (see Scott 2004).
Difficulties arise when, in the name of promoting greater justice, archaeol-
ogy’s alternative histories or epistemologies run afoul of Native understand-
ings of the past (Richard 2010b). While these tensions express some serious
challenges to archaeological research (Thiaw 2003), they are also productive
in the sense that they displace the study of Indigenous pasts from a rarefied
horizon of historical scholarship to one engaging with real-life struggles and
concerns (Richard 2009). They reveal constitutive gaps in the making of
Indigenous pasts, an incompleteness that demands discussion, revision, and
collaboration; a respectful engagement with Native claims to and under-
standings of the past, even as they may differ from what the archaeological
record seems to say; and accountability to the past, its architects and those
whose remember it (Silliman 2008; Smith and Wobst 2005). The success of
this “decolonizing” project rests partly on effectively bridging multiple hori-
zons of history-making, both material and discursive, between the past and
the present, which suggests that a concern for scale—its production, poetics,
and politics—might afford a critical step toward the writing of fairer and
more respectful Indigenous histories.
Notes
1. A growing field of historical archaeology is beginning to make important contributions
to these debates (McIntosh 2001; Thiaw 1999, 2008). While this work has made great
strides toward confronting the material past with recorded history, and casting local
histories in longer-term perspective, it has not always dissociated itself from narrative
structures attaching historical primacy to the “Atlantic moment” (e.g., Dème and Guèye
2007; see Richard 2009: 111–114).
2. It should be noted here that the term Serer is a complex ethnolinguistic category that
encompasses as many as seven distinct subgroups, whose histories, sociologies, and
cultural repertoires sometimes follow different paths. For the sake of convenience,
I use the word Serer in this chapter to refer to the Serer communities historically associ-
ated with the Siin province (Serer Singandum), even as the term flattens somewhat the
spectrum of cultural, political, and identitarian variations found in that region over
time. Also, to simplify matters of transliteration, I will be using the spelling Serer in
the course of this chapter, although a more precise and accurate phonetic rendering
should read “Seereer.”
3. Interest in the materialization of time has long captured social theorists, say, Walter
Benjamin’s notion of “dialectical image” or Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of “chronotope.”
For recent—and relevant—archaeological takes on these questions see Dawdy (2010)
and González-Ruibal (2008). The coexistence of multiple temporal orders in material
landscapes was also a central element of Henri Lefèbvre’s (1997) thought on the articu-
lation of space and politics.
4. Convergent calls for perspectives that complicate the relationship between change and
continuity, in the short and long term, can be found in chapters by Stahl and Silliman in
this volume. Their respective advocacy of “genealogies of practice” and “embodied his-
tories” profoundly resonates with the kind of scale-sensitivity evoked here. Elsewhere,
in his study of the Seneca homeland, Kurt Jordan (2008) has made a persuasive case for
the need to attend to variations in material histories within Indigenous societies and
refine our understanding of local repertoires of response to colonial entanglements.
5. See Dawdy (2010), Knapp and van Dommelen (2008), and Thomas (2004) for other
attempts to critically interrogate the implications of categories and experiences of
modernity on our reading of past cultural worlds.
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7

Lost in Tradition, Found in Transition

Historical writing in Senegambia has generally been struc-

colonial period, but whose echoes still resonate in contemporary Senegal.

Lost in Tradition: Uneven Perspectives on the

The advent of Atlantic contacts in Senegambia is often regarded as a defining

tory, which enjoys sharper resolution thanks to a comparatively richer record

Figure 7.1. Precolonial kingdoms of northern Senegambia (c. 1850).

In many ways, interpretive and epistemological tensions over the making

history in the past). With this framework in mind, I go on to examine how

of their consequences in the postcolonial present (Richard 2009).

Jumping Scales: Notes on Materiality, Historicity,

Scale has been a remarkably generative concept in archaeology in the past

especially the relevance of perspectives of the long term in making sense of

ity,” to particular spheres of belonging (home, village, city, region, nation,

is important: recognizing that materiality is socially, politically, and mor-

Found in Transition? Shades of Historicity in the

Historians of Senegambia have sometimes identified Portuguese navigations

outsourcing instead historical agency either to the turbulent play of external

spheres in different fashion. As would be expected, artifact traditions do

Transformations in the built landscape suggest likewise, while revealing

traditions describe as a recentering of the village landscape prompted by the

in part as a reaction to the rise of social instability, crises of production, and

the Siin is frequently described as a highly centralized kingdom, its mate-

and nineteenth centuries (Richard 2007:388). Likewise, the Mbayar, an iso-

The endurance of relatively unstratified spatialities throughout the Atlantic

of space and time into particular narrative conventions discourages literal

from scrambled historical moments into a form of moral imagination (Shaw

of commensal ritual ceremonies (Richard 2010a). Shifting to yet another scale,

Decolonizing Archaeological Knowledge?

Studying Indigenous pasts is seldom an easy task. It is often complicated by a

1998 Studies in Culture Contact: Interaction, Culture Change, and Archaeology.

1976 L’Autonomie locale des serer du Mbayar. In Autonomie locale et intégration

Lightfoot, Kent G., Antoinette Martinez, and Ann M. Schiff

Traditions. New York: Kluwer Academic.

Sheppard, Eric S., and Robert B. McMaster, eds.

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