and at a slower pace) the distant past of Europe. Similar conclusions were drawn by V. Jacques in his 1901 and 1904 studies of all the randomly collected “belles pieces” from Congo now in the Tervuren Museum in Belgium (the inheritor of the site and collections of the 1897 International Exhibition). The Tervuren collection included 655 tools collected by a police captain at Tumba, in what was the Belgian Congo, and these tools would shortly become the focus of a decisive theoretical debate that helped push the whole of African archaeology (anglophone and francophone) away from grand syntheses and toward ever-more particularistic obsessions with nomenclature.

The tombs of Madagascar attracted some attention when colonial rule was imposed, as the conqueror, Gallieni, recommended that the newly founded Académie Malgache choose as its first research priority the monuments and cities of the coast. In 1898, the head of the Académie Malgache, A. Jully, synthesized reports made by amateurs rummaging through the tombs—which continued to be looted for the western art market until World War II. In 1908, P. Callet published the oral traditional history of Madagascar, and it assigned periodic Arab contact as being responsible for all change and progress on the island. There has been little archaeology proper on Madagascar, and researchers showed little interest in the internal dynamics of state formation or human impact on the native megafauna until the postindependence period.

Finally, and ironically, the West African nations that composed the Afrique Occidentale Française (AOF) contain some of the world’s richest troves of lithic and metal archaeological remains, yet archaeological research in these countries remained amateur in nature and at very low density—even less so, perhaps, than in the Afrique Equatoriale Française (AEF) between Niger and Congo. Not surprisingly, the lower Senegal River (especially Saint-Louis at the mouth of the river) and the three communes near the temperate Cap Vert location of Dakar) was the first and more intensively explored (results were first published in 1851).

More “belles pieces,” generally collected by soldiers, explorers, and administrators in the desert north, found a home in the newly founded (1878) Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadero (now the Musée de l’Homme) in Paris. There they were studied and results were published by others—such as the founder of the Trocadero museum, Ernest Hamy, and the holder of the first chair of anthropology, Raymond Verneau—who had no firsthand experience in West Africa and certainly no appreciation for the context of the pieces. The museum sponsored collection and excavation campaigns in the Sahara (1870–1890 by F. Fernand) and the lakes region of the middle Niger (in the early 1900s by Lieutenant L. Desplagnes), and it published the unusually precise 1893–1899 excavation reports by L. Mouth (1899) of work at the Guinean Kakimbon rock shelter. However, analysis rarely went beyond speculation about the race of the toolmakers or inserting the finds into cultural-typological stages based upon the European sequence, with changes in the assemblage attributed to the intrusions of new people.

The excavations of Lieutenant Desplagnes at the tumuli of Killi and El Oualadgi are the exceptions of the period. Although this work was certainly not up to modern standards, it was exceptionally well recorded. The trenching of the large mounds was supervised, and Desplagnes kept and published the extensive notes he had taken during the excavations. Many of the finds were eventually properly cataloged in the Trocadero museum. Desplagnes alone among his contemporaries provided enough contextual information to allow subsequent republication and reinterpretation of these important sites.

Unfortunately, Desplagnes subscribed to the hyperdiffusionist thesis that all change, all “progress,” in sub-Saharan Africa was derived from the north, especially as the result of race mixing between the Hamites of Semitic, Sumerian, and Berber origins. The highly influential Maurice Delafosse believed in the civilizing influence of the Egyptians and Phoenicians and that Ghana, the first of the great western Sudan empires, was founded by Judeo-Syrians. Nevertheless, Delafosse was basically sympathetic to Africans, and he fought against the current fashion of considering the continent to be