great Sudanic kingdoms owed much to the work of Maurice Delafosse, governor-general of the French colonies of West Africa, who was trained in Oriental languages. His Haut-Sénégal-Niger (1912) integrated classical and Arab historical sources along with local written and oral histories to create a narrative about the history and development of the peoples of the French West Sudan. It was Delafosse’s Arabicist lens that focused attention on places mentioned in texts and attributed all cultural and political achievements in the West Sudan to influences from the north. Within this diffusionist perspective, it made perfect sense to toss out all material of local manufacture recovered during excavation and concentrate on imports and inscriptions, and the various excavations in the quest of the capitals of Ghana and Mali prior to 1940 all reflected this point of view. Delafosse’s influence was pervasive for several decades (De Barros 1990, 158–162; Holl 1990, 298–300).

With the arrival of Raymond Mauny in 1938 at the newly created Institut Français de l’Afrique Noire (IFAN) in Dakar, the approach to proto-history in the western Sudan became more systematic. Although trained as a lawyer and an administrator, Mauny had a gift for observation and a habit of meticulous recording similar to that of Desplagnes. Mauny’s interests were wide ranging, but he was particularly attracted to the trans-Saharan trade and the great Sudanic kingdoms. His monumental synthesis of all known archaeological and historical information relevant to West African proto-history, Tableau géographique de l’Ouest Africain au Moyen Age (1961), remains indispensable today.

Mauny did, however, effectively “medievalize” the western Sudan by regarding it largely as an “exclusive economic and cultural dependent of the Islamic world, principally the Arabo-Berber North African sphere” (Mauny 1961, 15). This construction of a West African Middle Ages profoundly influenced the development of the archaeology of the Sudanic kingdoms by transferring the preoccupation with architecture, trade, and text from European/Arab medieval history and archaeology to West Africa. Mauny’s excavations at Koumbi Saleh and Gao set the pattern for French excavations well into the 1970s: a focus on prominent architectural units (stone or fired-brick houses, mosques, tombs), detailed publication of inscriptions (funerary stelae, glass denerals) and imports, but a relatively cursory description of other classes of material. The local context and content of these kingdoms had not yet appeared as a topic of interest. Furthermore, excavation methodology was conceived of in fairly broad terms, making the reconstruction of finely tuned chronological or depositional sequences difficult.

Yet Mauny’s multidisciplinary vision for archaeology—combining geography, oral and written sources, and field research—and his pioneering use of techniques such as aerial photography and radiocarbon dating pointed the way to the future of research on the Sudanic kingdoms. In addition, he was an archivist par excellence, extracting from people throughout French West Sudan observations and reports on things archaeological and historical. The IFAN archives in Dakar remain an important resource, although their quality declined precipitously after Mauny’s departure.

On the cusp of independence, a new generation of French researchers began work at Sahelian sites including Koumbi Saleh and Tegdaoust (the latter thought to be the entrepôt of Awdaghost mentioned by eleventh-century Arab chronicles and linked to Ghana). Jean Devisse, a medieval historian from the Sorbonne, and his team sought to verify on the ground the caravan routes described by the Arab authors. They mobilized large-scale resources to excavate hundreds of square meters of stone-built foundation down to a depth of seven or more meters (Devisse 1983; Polet 1985; Robert-Chaleix 1989; Vanacker 1979), and they excavated houses, mosques, and tombs. Trucks removed tons of material for later study. True to the historically framed objectives of the research, a limited subset of the material has received the bulk of the systematic study and publication to date: architecture, coins, glass denerals, North African oil lamps, imported pottery, and metals. Detailed investigation of the subsistence economy or domestic pottery production has generally not been undertaken. Ironically enough, for all the resources expended