synthesize particular fragments of the prehistory of Polish territories.

The second edition of his Wielkopolska w czasach prehistorvcznych (Wielkopolska in the Prehistoric Period), published in 1923, was considered the fundamental model for all approaches to the synthesis of the prehistory of the territories of Poland. Kostrzewski was particularly interested in synthesizing long periods in the prehistory of Poland, for example, from the Neolithic Age to the great migration period, considered in Prehistoria ziem polskich (1948; Prehistory of the Polish Lands) and Pradzieje Polski (1965; Prehistory of Poland). He was also the author of regional syntheses: the one already mentioned about Wielkopolska as well as others about Pomerania and Silesia.

Arkadiusz Marciniak

Koumbi Saleh

The forty-four-hectare tell of Koumbi Saleh is one of the great urban sites of Africa. In the eastern Hodh, several miles from Mauritania’s border with Mali, the site comprises over sixty mounds, delimited by large streets, of debris from collapsed buildings constructed with plaques of locally available schist. A main attraction of the site since its discovery in 1914 by Bonnel de Mezières, a French civil servant, has been its putative identification as the capital of the Empire of Ghana as described by the Arab chronicler al B’akri in 1068. Virtually all pre-1970s archaeological work at the site, by Bonnel de Mezières, Raymond Mauny, and others, was undertaken primarily to evaluate this identification.

The archaeological material encountered in the course of these early, quite extensive excavations was given only summary treatment, and no full excavation reports were ever published. Beginning in 1975, French archaeologist Sophie Berthier’s excavations, by contrast, considered the site in archaeological rather than historical terms and focused on the study of architectural evolution at the site and the characterization of material culture through time. Berthier’s work was undertaken as part of more extensive excavations at and around the Koumbi Saleh mosque that were directed by Serge Robert. To date, Berthier’s work is the only publication to have emerged from that extensive project.

Berthier conducted excavations during four field seasons on a single building in the north central part of the site not far from the Grande Place, a large public area. She concluded that of the thick deposits encountered, half belonged to a period of “grand urbanization,” dated by twelve radiocarbon determinations on charcoal to the eleventh–fourteenth centuries. Architecture at that time was very distinctive and commonly included rectangular and triangular wall niches, the use of paving stones on floor, step, and terrace surfaces, and the use of painted schist wall plaques. By the late fourteenth century, the buildings had been abandoned.

Strongly focused on architectural evolution, Berthier’s work is thin with regard to analyses and interpretations that illuminate the changing nature of subsistence and trade at the apparent capital of the empire. The extensive areas of Koumbi Saleh that lack stone ruins still remain to be investigated, and among these may be the remains of the indigenous town in which the pagan king (ghana) lived, described by al-Bakri as separate from the stone-built town inhabited by Muslims and northern traders.

Susan McIntosh

See also

Africa, Francophone

References

Berthier, S. 1997. Recherches archéologiques sur la capitale de l’Empire de Ghana. International Series no. 680. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports.

Bonnel de Mezières, A. 1920. “Recherche sur l’emplacement de Ghana (fouille à Koumbi Saleh et Settah).” Comptes Rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres 12: 227–273.

Mauny, R., and P. Thomassey. 1951. “Campagne de fouilles à Koumbi Saleh (Ghana?).” Bulletin de l’Institut Français de l’Afrique Noire B, no. 13: 438–462.

———. 1956. “Campagne de fouilles de 1950 à Koumbi Saleh (Ghana?).” Bulletin de l’Institut Français de l’Afrique Noire B, no. 18: 117–140.

Robert, D., and S. Robert. 1972. “Douze années de recherches archéologiques en République islamique de Mauritanie.” Annales de la Faculté des Lettres, Dakar 2: 195–233 (pp. 221–226 concern Koumbi Saleh).