industrial-scale production. Ethnographers and ethnoarchaeologists have linked studies of ancient iron production to those of the social role of blacksmiths (E. Bernus and N. Echard). Particularly noteworthy is the work on the ancient linkage of social and production concerns by the Senegalese archaeologist H. Bocoum, who is in the vanguard of a new French theoretical paradigm, the chaines operatoires.

Research on West African ceramics has also profoundly influenced the direction of French research. On the side of microexamination, there is the experimental physics conducted on Malian lakes region ceramics by the Group Nucleaire d’Orsay (Fontes, Person, Saliege). Concerning interpretation of ethnicity and symbolism of identity, the pioneering work on (Malian) Sarakole pottery by the Swiss A. Gallay (and of various middle Niger groups by E. Huysecom and A. Mayor) has stimulated an interest in ethnoarchaeology in France. T. Togola has begun a study of the technical and social organization of gold production in the famous Bambouk fields of western Mali, and processual studies of settlement evolution and early urbanism have had the most profound impact on the understanding of the early history of West African societies.

Beginning at jenné-jeno (middle Niger) in the late 1970s and continuing up to 1994 with a program of multisite coring (including the present town of Jenné), S. McIntosh and R. McIntosh used controlled stratigraphical excavation, complemented by regional survey, to show that considerable revisions were needed in the historians’ conclusion that towns, heterogeneous populations, and long-distance trade were a late (early-second millennium) gift from traders coming across the Sahara. The Jenné-jeno research was just the first glimpse of extensive east-west trade networks, urbanism (often taking a distinctive clustered form), and occupational specialization that developed during the first millennium. The fact that these were indigenous developments was confirmed by subsequent surveys and excavations along the middle Niger by the McIntoshes (at Dia in 1986–1987 and Timbuktu in 1983–1984), by T. Togola at the clustered Akumbu and Boundouboukou sites in the Mema (late 1980s), by the (1982–1987) Malian Institut des Sciences Humaines inventory project (Sanogo, Dembele, Raimbault) in the lakes region immediately upstream of the Niger Bend, and (since 1989) by the Dutch Projet Togue (van der Waals) in the upper inland delta floodplain.

Since 1990, the McIntoshes and their Senegalese collaborator, H. Bocoum, have repeated this successful settlement pattern examination in the middle Senegal Valley in a 460-square-kilometer region flanked by the excavated sites of Cubalel and Sioure and, upstream, at the hinterland of the large site of Sincu Bara. Small early–Iron Age settlements evolved into specialized iron production centers and habitation clusters here as well. However, true urbanism and social complexity appear to have developed genuinely late. Members of the middle Senegal Valley team, I. Thiaw and D. Wolfman, initiated the first application of archaeomagnetic dating to francophone Africa with a dating curve covering the first to the fourteenth centuries a.d.

Conclusion: The Politics of Internationalization

The relationship between France and its ex-colonies continues to be debated, and if anything, the debate became more heated after the end of the cold war. Some people question whether that relationship has retarded democracy in Africa (“Dangerous Liaisons” 1994) and, in a similar vein, whether the close cleaving of francophone African archaeologists to metropolitan paradigms and methods has retarded an appreciation of the richness and originality of the continent’s past. Two hotly debated issues are critical to the future of internationalization of francophone African archaeology: the exclusivity of La Francophonie and the traditional French distrust of theory.

The concept of La Francophonie goes beyond the ideal of a geopolitical commonwealth of French-speaking nations. Particularly when applied to Africa, it refers to the sentimental assertion that France’s ties to its ex-colonies are charmed, and quite unlike those of other ex-colonial powers, because of a unique spiritual understanding. Idealized in France, the concept is often vilified in Africa as a justification