without history by demonstrating the importance of West African cities and their great empires. His efforts led the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres to cosponsor Desplagnes at El Oualdgi and to send Bonnel de Mezieres to the presumed capital of Ghana. Still, the interpretive paradigm (of outside stimulation leading to the emergence of historical states and cities) was fixed and remained unchallenged during the following post–World War I period; indeed, it underlay much of postindependence research. This paradigm described the area’s history as unprogressive local populations forming advanced political forms and urban centers only after contact with traders or colonists from the “centers of radiation” across the Sahara.

High Colonialism: Local Particularism from World War I to 1960

The paradigm of Arab cultural stimulation provided a backdoor for the legitimacy and, incidentally, the professionalization of West African prehistory that began in the 1930s. Although on the extreme periphery of the areas covered by Gabriel Camps’s prehistory and history of North Africa (1980), the towns and states of the southern desert and the Sahel were, nevertheless, worthy of attention as legitimate parts of the Islamic Arab-Berber world.

It is important to note that the purpose of archaeological work at those sites was to confirm a particular location as a place named in the Arabic chronicles, to recover (cross-datable) North African imports, and to expose monumental stone-built structures (especially mosques). Major “medieval” sites investigated during this period include, in Mauritania, Azugi (by Theodore Monod and Raymond Mauny), Tegdaoust in Mauritania (by Mauny), and the presumed capital of Ghana, Koumbi Saleh (by Lazartigues, Thomassey, and Mauny; Mauny and Szumowski); in Mali, Gao (by le Pontois, Kikoine, and Michel; Bartoli; Mauny), Teghaza (by Langlais and Bessac; de Beauchene; Bourgrat), Tadmekka (by Lhote; Mauny), Timbuktu (by Mauny); in Guinea, the presumed capital of Mali, Niani (by Cooley and Binger; Vidal; Gaillard; Montrat; Mauny); and in Niger, Takedda (by Lieutenant Roy; Lombard; Lhote; Mauny). Raymond Mauny pulled together these disparate archaeological efforts, along with Arab and European documentary sources and oral traditions, in his masterly Tableau Géographique de l’Ouest Africain au Moyen Age [A Geography of West Africa during the Middle Ages, 1961], which remains the prime secondary source on the latest prehistory and early history of West Africa.

Mauny’s career is illustrative of the professional winds tugging at all of francophone Africa. Trained as a lawyer-administrator, he arrived in Senegal in 1938, the founding year of the premier African research center, the Institut Français d’Afrique Noire (IFAN). By 1947, an avocational historical bent had matured, and he headed the prehistory and proto-history (“metal age and medieval”) department at IFAN. Mauny took a polymath’s interest in all periods (lithics and rock art included), visited most known sites, hounded amateur excavators for their unpublished field notes, compiled answers to questionnaires sent to administrators, and displayed his exceptionally interdisciplinary vision in over 220 articles and several synthetic monographs.

If not brilliant, Mauny’s excavations were at least up to the standards of most other professionals in francophone Africa (and no worse than even some today). Mauny recruited George Szumowski for IFAN at Bamako (Mali), and he dug innumerable (and poorly published) petits sondages (test pits dug nonstratigraphically) in the many habitation sites of the middle Niger (Mema, Mopti), near Segou, and in many rock-shelter deposits near Bamako. Similar work was done, for example, by P. Jouenne and J. Joire on the megalithic and earthen monuments of Senegal and by Mauny and a host of administrators on the tells and tumuli in the lakes region of the middle Niger. Were these efforts better than amateur scratchings? Stratigraphic excavation was the exception, no ceramic sequences or formal pottery typologies were developed, and the recording of the Sahara’s prolific rock art was generally inadequate (except by Monod). And in lithic studies, with the exception of Laforgue and Hubert, there was no critique of the continuing reliance upon haphazard surface collections and fossiles directeurs derived from the European sequences.