Past Projects

From the 15th to the 18th centuries, while northern Ghana was becoming Islamized under the influence of trade contacts with the Niger Loop, how did the Islamization of society manifest itself in the manufacturing operations, functional variety, and stylistic repertoire of ceramics at Old Buipe? The objective of this project was to reconstruct the technical, technological, and stylistic evolution of ceramic production on the Old Buipe site and to characterize the assemblages of the pots in relation to their depositional contexts.

The collection that served as a corpus is the result of excavations carried out since January 2015 as part of the "Gonja Project" research project led by Denis Genequand (University of Geneva) and Wazi Apoh (University of Ghana, Accra/Legon). The study of the material was partly carried out on-site in Buipe, and the laboratory analyses were conducted at the Ceramic Technology Laboratory (University of Manitoba) with the support of Prof. Kent Fowler, who directs this laboratory. Going through three levels of analysis (macroscopic, mesoscopic, and microscopic), I classified pottery into seven major morphological and functional categories. While some classes persisted over time, others appeared with Islamization.

The Atlantic era lasted from the 15th to the 19th century and was marked by great security instability for West African communities. The threats came mainly from the transatlantic slave trade, internal domestic slavery and the reconfiguration of geopolitical space due to territorial conquests. Faced with this growing insecurity, many communities organized their defense by building fortifications in their villages. These defensive enclosures were built of kneaded mud (banco), mud brick, or stone; the most common name for them was tata or tata kourou (when they were made of stone).

Thus, from 2015 to 2019, as part of my doctoral work, I prospected, identified and studied 15 sites recognized as former tata in the eastern Senegal region. Some of these sites still had remains of walls on the surface, and archaeological excavations have highlighted the foundations and the construction techniques used to build the walls. Ethnohistorical surveys and historical research carried out through a systematic review of the accounts of European travelers from the 16th to the 19th century have made it possible to reconstruct these sites' defensive and strategic functions. This doctoral research was carried out as a member of the Falémé Research Project of the Archaeology and Settlement of Africa Laboratory (now Arcan) of the University of Geneva and received funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Swiss-Lichtenstein Foundation for Archaeological Research Abroad and the Department of Public Education of the Canton of Geneva. The results of our research, which is at the interface between archaeology, history, and architectural heritage, are detailed in the monograph Endogenous Fortifications in Eastern Senegal (Aymeric Nsangou 2022), available in open access thanks to the support of the SNSF.

The Bamun are one of the most important groups among the Western Region of Cameroon communities. They settled in the locality they currently occupy around the end of the 15th century. Arriving as simple migrants from the neighboring Tikar region to the northeast, the Bamun set up and developed a territory acquisition and control strategy. Through wars of conquest, tricks, and above all, through a change in the conception of the centrality of power, they dominated a vast territory of about 8000 km2. They federated diverse tribal groups around a royal lineage that made Fumban the kingdom's capital and the country's heart. Oral history has preserved these events, but they have also been imprinted on the landscape through structures that make up the defensive military architecture of Fumban.

Through archaeological and ethnographic work, I studied the material remains of the military architecture of Fumban as part of my Master's thesis at the University of Yaoundé I. These witnesses consist of a series of ditched enclosures surrounding the city of Foumban, traps dug on the glacis preceding the enclosures, and a wall built late on the embankment bordering the intramural side of the enclosures (Aymeric 2013; 2018). Later, probably at the end of the 19th century, the wall was given monumental gates that made a great impression on the first Europeans who arrived in the city at the beginning of the 20th century. The great care that has been taken to conserve, renovate and rebuild one of these gates, called nku nshu nsem or "gateway", has led us to question the conservation and heritage strategies of this military architecture, almost all of whose structures are practically destroyed or in the process of being destroyed, except for the entrance gate (Aymeric 2021, 2022).