Nicole Petit-Maire. Weaving together all aspects of climate, environment, and human and animal adaptations along the Mauritanian coast and, in particular, in the Malian Sahara from ca. 10,000 to 3500 b.p., it provides hitherto unavailable details about regional microclimates and micro-adaptations. It also contains the curious and yet-to-be explained fact that human colonization of the formerly superarid Malian Sahara began only after 7000 b.p., almost two millennia after the onset of pluvial conditions.

Several other smaller projects focus on specific human adaptations: the Berkeley excavations at Adrar Bous (Air, Niger), led by j. desmond clark, provide information about Saharan cattle pastoralism; Andy Smith’s Karkarichinkat (Tilemsi Valley, Mali) study of adaptations to cyclical climatic change includes the development of domestic bulrush millet from a system of seasonal wild grain harvesting; the highly emotional debates about the articulation of the Tichitt (Mauritanian Hodh) cliff and lakeside sites between P. Munson (sequential evolution of grain and cattle food production from a generalized lacustrine system) and A. Holl (components in a relatively stable seasonal round); and the Senegalese coast microenvironmental study by Linares de Sapir.

One of the most interesting developments in adaptation studies is the recent reassessment of the ideas advanced in the 1970s by Gabriel Camps and John Sutton that the pluvial Sahara and Sahel were home to a fundamentally homogeneous lacustrine way of life based upon fishing, hunting aquatic mammals, and gathering lakeside grasses. As early as 1963, Allan Gallay documented the great diversity of Neolithic occurrences in the Malian Azawad but shied away from interpreting these as the remains of contemporaneous, specialized communities. By the mid-1980s, it was apparent that generalized aquatic exploitation sites were the exception and not the rule in the Sahara, but it was unclear whether the specialized sites represented a time-progression of adaptation to increasing desiccation, seasonal components in a seasonal round, or another adaptation altogether. The third alternative has been suggested by work by J.-P. Maitre in the Hoggar Mountains of Niger and, most convincingly, by the Malian-American team of T. Togola and K. MacDonald in the Mema and Douzena region of Mali. They believe they have evidence of contemporaneous, articulated specialist communities in the late–Stone Age—the presumed ancestors of the articulated, clustered communities of the early–Iron Age in the floodplains of the Senegal and Niger.

Large-scale processual studies have looked at demography and the social and pyrotechnical aspects of metal production. Working within the framework of a physical anthropological study of coherence and duration of ethnic groups, a Dutch team lead by R. Bedaux recovered skeletons and laboriously excavated cave deposits in the Bandiagara cliffs of Mali and at the middle Niger sites of Galia and Doupwil. Preservation in the Tellem caves was quite exceptional and allowed the recovery of organic material, such as wood and textiles, that contributes to an unusual view of the rich material culture of the first millennium a.d. In Senegambia, the demographers V. Martin and Ch. Becker integrated the results of their exhaustive survey of post Late Stone Age sites and funerary monuments into their ethnohistoric and ethnographic study of modern ethnic group distributions and movements.

Perhaps the best examples of the salubrious effects of the internationalization of francophone West African archaeology are to be seen in studies of metal production and settlement studies (particularly the origins of urbanism). A principal focus of the Agades Basin project was the evolution of copper and bronze production in this important raw material source region. Studies of iron have been particularly stimulated by communication across regions and across national research traditions. Some iron studies focus on the problem of when and where it first appeared and if it was of indigenous origin (e.g., G. Quechon and J.-P. Roset in the Niger Termit massif; D. Grebenart at the Tigidit cliffs of Niger), while other researchers in Togo (de Barros and Goucher), the Mema of the middle Niger (Haaland), and along the middle Senegal (D. Robert and M. Sognane; B. Chavane, H. Bocoum, and D. Killick) have investigated the organization and environmental consequences of