Of Trees and Earth Shrines

An Interdisciplinary Approach to Settlement Histories in the West African Savanna

Bibliographic Data

ID12002823
AuthorsCarola Lentz (Goethe University Frankfurt, corresponding author), H Sturm (Goethe University Frankfurt), Hans-Jürgen Sturm
Year2001
Volume28
Pages139-168
Publication date2001-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueHistory in Africa (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0361-5413 • E-ISSN: 1558-2744
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/3172212
PMID17657912
OpenAlexW1966345616
LanguageEN
Citations received25
References cited26

For a vegetation geographer and an anthropologist to come together to write on the settlement histories of segmentary societies in the West African savanna is unusual or at least rare. A few words on the origin of this cooperation therefore seem appropriate. For over ten years, in the context of an interdisciplinary research program at the Universität Frankfurt am Main, archeologists, anthropologists, linguists, botanists and geographers have been working together on the history of cultures, languages, and natural environment of the West African savanna, especially the interaction between human activity and the natural environment. That one should actually be speaking in many cases of a culturally mediated “landscape” rather than a “natural environment” is one of the outcomes of the research projects, which have focused mainly on different regions of Burkina Faso (in the sahel and Sudanese zone) and the Lake Chad area of northeast Nigeria. The present paper has emerged from a botanical and an anthropological-historical project on the history of vegetation and of settlement in south and southwest Burkina Faso. This history has been shaped by the great expansion of the Dagara-speaking population. In the last two hundred years (possibly longer), small groups of Dagara patrilineages, related and allied to one another, have migrated north and northwest, probably from the region around Wa in present-day Ghana, and have founded numerous new settlements—a process of land appropriation that is still going on today, though with changed circumstances regarding land rights (see map 1)

Appropriation · Archaeology · Cartography · Context (archaeology · Ethnology · Geographer · Geography · Human settlement · Indigenous · Natural (archaeology · Population · Settlement (finance · Sociology · Vegetation (pathology · African Botany and Ecology Studies · African Studies and Ethnography · History · Rangeland Management and Livestock Ecology · Ecology

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