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Between a.d. 800 and a.d. 1500, the important kingdoms of Ghana, Kawkaw (Gao), Takrur, and Mali flourished in the Sudanic zone of West Africa between Lake Chad and the Atlantic Ocean. Repeatedly mentioned and described in varying degrees of detail by Arab chroniclers of the period, the capitals and major entrepôts of these polities have attracted considerable archaeological attention, much of which has been conducted in an historicist mode with archaeology serving mainly to identify the towns and trading posts described in the Arab texts. Archaeological data were sought to embellish or fill out textual accounts; they were rarely used to address questions beyond those already raised by text content or analysis. Because the core areas of the kingdoms lay mainly within the former French West Sudan, the influence of French scholars on the trajectory of research in this century has been considerable. Since the 1970s, however, scholars trained outside the French system, including Dutch, Swiss, Germans, Norwegians, British, and Americans, have increasingly made important contributions.
For the first half of the twentieth century, archaeological undertakings relevant to the Sahelian kingdoms were pursued by French civil servants and military personnel. There was no professionalization of archaeology analogous to that in England, where scholars of the caliber of mortimer wheeler and gertrude caton-thompson mounted important excavations at sites such as Mohenjo Daro and great zimbabwe. Rather, in French West Sudan, curious administrators and officers who lacked any formal training were offered a variety of opportunities to investigate highly visible archaeological sites. As with the explorers who set out to map the course of the Niger River in the nineteenth century, some of these officials had a gift for systematically describing what they saw along the way but most did not.
Lieutenant Louis Desplagnes had not only a gift for detailed observation and reportage but also a passion for archaeology and ethnology. In his richly detailed Le plateau central nigérien
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