Diet, health, mobility, and funerary practices in pre-colonial West Africa : a new bio-archaeological project in the Dogon Country

In this communication, we announce a new study, which aims to investigate the dynamics of what life was like during pre-colonial times for pre-Dogon and early Dogon people from the Bandiagara Escarpment in the Republic of Mali. This research, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, forms part of a large body of research led by the Laboratory “Archaeology and Population in Africa” (APA) at the University of Geneva, concerned with the reconstruction of settlement history and emergence of social complexity during the last two millennia. Our research plans to adopt a new approach combining bio-anthropological, bio-chemical, chronological, and archaeological data to unravel the history of peopling of the Niger Bend. We will explore themes such as population relatedness, geographic origins and mobility patterns of people, dietary continuity or change, economy, diseases, and evolution of funerary practices. To do so, we employ different methods including dental anthropology, stable isotope analyses of carbon, nitrogen, and strontium, and palaeo-microbiology. Numerous AMS radiocarbon dates will also be processed from the human skeletal remains to establish the use of the different burial caves through time, as well as to detect possible epidemic events