demonstrate the fallacy of the argument that processual studies must wait in francophone Africa until the basic culture-history sequences have been established. Certainly, studies of process cannot go far without a basic chronological and spatial framework, but the two can be married very profitably.

Perhaps nowhere else does one see this marriage of culture history and theoretical orientation better than in West Africa. Archaeology in francophone West Africa got off to a shaky beginning in the early 1960s, partly because some newly independent countries such as Guinea and Mali were quite hostile to outside researchers and research and partly because very few resources were available for pure research. Now, however, the twin pillars of internationalization and greater institutional support of archaeology are of the highest caliber in West Africa.

It is true that much of the postindependence research continues to be little further advanced theoretically than that of the preceding period. The prevailing types and classification logic of lithic and rock-art studies continue to be of strict European derivation. Function of assemblages is ignored in the search to define geographically widespread, temporally stable traditions. Most regional surveys continue to ignore variability within regional traditions or broad facies. In some surveys, sites not of the target tradition are not even recorded.

In the early historic (proto-historic) period, continuity with an older research paradigm is seen most clearly in “medieval” trade town research. Vast resources have been devoted to extensive areal exposure of the stone architecture at second millennium a.d. sites such as the Mauritanian Tegdaoust, Azugi, and Koumbi Saleh; the Guinean Niani; Mali’s Gao; and Niger’s Azelik and Marandet. The purpose of this research was to confirm these sites as the trade centers mentioned by various Arab geographers or travelers (e.g., Tegdaoust as al-Bakri’s eleventh-century Awdaghost). This orientation makes it difficult to use the data from these sites to talk about processes of culture contact because indigenous quarters are ignored and, with the exception of Tim Insoll’s recent work at Gao, we lack even the most basic ceramic and other artifact sequences.

The final continuity with the colonial period can been seen in the orientation of many of the regional site inventories and salvage surveys to which much national research effort and much foreign funding have been dedicated. Sites are classified by site morphology or by arbitrarily assigned diagnostic surface finds, and survey essentially becomes an exercise in placing points on a map. Often the salvage pressures and the lack of funds preclude any other approach, as in the case of B. Gado’s exemplary Niger River survey upstream of Niani and, since 1975, his salvage of the important terracottas associated with necropolises in the Kareugourou region. However, surveys that have had a more processual orientation illustrate how much more could have been accomplished by extensive and adequately funded inventories in, for example, the lower reaches of the Senegal River valley or the lakes region of Mali’s middle Niger.

A classic example of how survey, although birthed in a salvage situation, can illuminate larger processual issues is the interdisciplinary research conducted in the Agades Basin of Niger by Suzanne Bernus, Eduard Bernus, and Pierre Gouletquer. The detail of site recording, the combination of multidisciplinary paleoenvironmental work, and the supplementary ethnoarchaeological work on camel pastoralism and specialist (copper) production make this project stand out. The Agades Basin project, however, is just one of several recent projects that have gone beyond mere site and artifact cataloging toward an ever more detailed understanding of late-Pleistocene and Holocene adaptations in the Sahara and the Sahel. These archaeological data complement the spectacular Saharan paleoclimatic information developed since 1980, particularly from lake level, diatom, and palynological sources.

At times, fine archaeological and physical anthropological work is appended to projects that are principally geomorphological and climatological in thrust. The best example is the interdisciplinary interpretation of human colonization of the Sahara and adaptation to its changing environments developed by a team led by the geologist