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Monumental Architecture in Mountain Landscapes: The This article was downloaded by: [Bowdoin College] On: 29 June 2013, At: 04:32 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/raza20 Monumental architecture in mountain landscapes: the diy-geδ-bay sites of northern Cameroon Scott MacEachern a & Nicholas David b a Department of Sociology and Anthropology , Bowdoin College , 7000 College Station, Brunswick , ME 04011 , United States of America b Department of Archaeology , University of Calgary , 2500 University Drive, Calgary , Alberta , T2N 1N4 , Canada Published online: 26 Jun 2013. To cite this article: Scott MacEachern & Nicholas David (2013): Monumental architecture in mountain landscapes: the diy-geδ-bay sites of northern Cameroon, Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa, 48:2, 241-262 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0067270X.2013.790653 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and- conditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa, 2013 Vol. 48, No. 2, 241Á262, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0067270X.2013.790653 Monumental architecture in mountain landscapes: the diy-ged-bay sites of northern Cameroon Scott MacEacherna* and Nicholas Davidb aDepartment of Sociology and Anthropology, Bowdoin College, 7000 College Station, Brunswick, ME 04011, United States of America; bDepartment of Archaeology, University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive, Calgary, Alberta, T2N 1N4, Canada The DGB sites are complexes of dry-stone terraces and platforms in the Mandara Mountains of northern Cameroon. They constitute the earliest well-established evidence for human occupation of this region and raise important questions about the nature of monumentality, relationships with social complexity and areal culture history. The present state of knowledge of the DGB sites and questions arising are summarised and reviewed. While it appears that the sites represent indigenous responses to major areal droughts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, this is neither a complete explanation nor does it address the relationship between the montagnards and the state societies at that time developing in the surrounding plains. Deeper understanding of the DGB sites requires research into their variation and their roles within inhabited landscapes, as well as a reformulation of largely implicit models of historical process and agency corresponding to a topographical dichotomisation of mountain and plains. Keywords: monumentality; DGB sites; Mandara; landscapes; Lake Chad Basin Les sites DGB sont des complexes de plateformes et de terrasses caracte´rises par des fac¸ades lisses en pierres se`ches soigneusement construites. On y trouve des passages inte´rieurs, des escaliers et des silos formant un tout culturel unique au sein d’une tradition montagnarde largement re´pandue et de longue dure´e. Ils constituent ainsi les plus anciens restes d’une occupation humaine bien e´tablie dans cette zone montagneuse, et ils posent des questions de grande importance sur des sujets varie´s tels que la nature de la monumentalite´, ses relations avec la complexite´ sociale, et l’histoire culturelle des terres au sud du Lac Tchad. Ici nous Downloaded by [Bowdoin College] at 04:32 29 June 2013 re´sumons l’e´tat actuel des connaissances de ces sites et passons en revue les questions souleve´es. Bien que les sites DGB semblent eˆtre des re´ponses tout a` fait indige`nes aux graves pe´riodes de se´cheresse subis a` travers la zone pe´ri-tchadienne pendant les 15e et 16e sie`cles de notre e`re, ceci ne constitue certainement pas une explication comple`te, et ne s’adresse pas aux relations sociales et autres entre les montagnards et les socie´te´s e´tatiques en voie de de´veloppement dans les plaines environnantes. Pour favoriser une meilleure compre´hension des sites DGB, il faudrait mieux connaıˆtre la gamme de leurs variations internes et leurs relations intimes et re´ciproques avec les paysages dans lesquels demeurait le peuple DGB. Il serait ne´cessaire aussi de reformuler certains mode`les * restant en grande partie implicites * du processus historique et d’agency correspondant a` une dichotomisation topographique de montagne et plaine. *Email: [email protected] # 2013 Taylor & Francis 242 S. MacEachern and N. David Introduction Over the last 12 years, the DGB1 sites of northern Cameroon have been the focus of a considerable amount of archaeological research and publication, first by Mandara Archaeological Project research teams led by the second author beginning in 2002, and then by the DGB Archaeological Project, led by the first author and beginning in 2007. The sixteen DGB sites are complexes of dry-stone terraces and platforms on the slopes of the northwestern extension of the Mandara Mountains in northern Cameroon. They are the earliest well-established evidence for human occupation of this mountainous region and include the largest and most complex examples of stone architecture known to date from Central Africa. This area is also one of the most densely settled human landscapes in sub-Saharan Africa, now occupied by dozens of different ethnic and linguistic groups and with an extremely complex cultural and political history (Sterner 2003). The functioning and the role of the DGB sites is thus potentially an issue of some significance for our understanding of the history of the southern Lake Chad Basin and its peripheries and the sites are certainly of a scale sufficient to provide a worthy case study for any examination of monumentality in Africa. However, any such investigation immediately raises a number of significant questions when placed in the context of previous research in this region. The first such questions are intimately related: what were the roles of the DGB sites in the communities that built and used them, and how do we understand the significant variability in size and architecture within the set of 16 known DGB sites? Put slightly differently: what were the sites used for and were they all used in the same way? Second, and closely related to these initial questions: how do we understand ‘monumental architecture’ in the DGB case, given the ways that archaeologists have used that concept in other parts of the world? Finally, how did these sites fit within the broader landscape of the northern Mandara Mountains of Cameroon and Nigeria, at the time of their construction and use? The two authors of this paper have collaborated for decades on research in this region, but nevertheless approach these questions from distinct perspectives. Before working on the DGB sites, David undertook extensive ethnographic and ethnoarch- aeological research on montagnard populations (especially the Mafa in Cameroon and the Sukur in Nigeria), while MacEachern was excavating Iron Age sites on the Downloaded by [Bowdoin College] at 04:32 29 June 2013 plains directly north of the Mandara Mountains. Our interpretations are certainly influenced by these different fieldwork experiences, as well as by our conversations and our work on the DGB sites themselves. This paper summarises our discussions about these fascinating sites, at least to early 2013. As is already evident, it is a paper filled with questions about the DGB sites, with rather fewer definitive answers easily to hand, but that is in part due to their complexity within a very complicated environment. We hope that this paper will prove useful in advancing our under- standings of the roles of monumental architecture in the Mandara Mountains. Monumentality, political evolution and the Mandara Mountains In her opening remarks for the conference symposium that generated these papers, Hildebrand (2012; see also 2013) noted some of the limitations inherent in Bruce Trigger’s (1990) influential discussion of monumental architecture, especially its Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa 243 assumption that such architecture is intimately associated with social hierarchy and the exercise of power by e´lites. In a paper written in large part to rescue social evolutionism and cross-cultural comparison from what Trigger perceived as the excesses of 1980s post-processualism, he makes monumental architecture both a fundamental signpost of and a central operational element in early states. Hildebrand suggests, rightly in our opinion, that such assumptions have contributed to a dichotomisation between ‘monumental’ and ‘prosaic’ architecture that does not serve archaeological research well, especially in that it obscures intermediate ranges of architectural elaboration and cuts such architecture
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