Monumental Architecture in Mountain Landscapes: The

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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

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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 façades 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 dureé. 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 souleveés. Bien que les sites DGB semblent eˆtre des re´ponses tout a` fait indige`nes aux graves pe´riodes de sećheresse 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 rećiproques avec les paysages dans lesquels demeurait le peuple DGB. Il serait nećessaire 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 ethnoarchaeological 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 understandings 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 off from wider human landscapes. This is a particular problem given the history of research on political evolution in Africa. The assumption of a necessary relationship between architectural forms and states holds research hostage to longstanding debates about political complexity on the continent, where the existence of ancient indigenous states south of the Sahara has been widely accepted only for 3040 years and where questions of the origins of such states can have considerable modern significance. (For specific perspectives on this issue, see the various treatments in McIntosh 1999). If monumental architecture is exclusively associated with states, as Trigger claims, then (a) are ancient communities responsible for impressive architecture automatically to be upgraded to the status of states or, (b) if not, is such architecture a priori not monumental? Such dichotomous conclusions seem simplistic at a time when archaeological research on social complexity has come to focus increasingly on heterarchical social forms and intermediate scales of complexity such as chiefdoms. Such questions are not unique to Africa. The prehistoric site of Caral, the largest of a number of impressive sites in the Supe Valley of Peru, has recently been identified as the capital of a third-millennium BC state (Solis 2006), largely on the basis of the monumental architecture found there, although in fact there is considerable disagreement about the meaning and political implications of such architecture in Pacific South America at almost any point between the Preceramic and Inka periods (cf. Quilter 2002; Haas and Creamer 2006: 746). Research in the American Midwest has similarly parsed the political status of Cahokia within the constellation of Mississippian sites, as a chiefdom, a state or an entity located off such idealised evolutionary trajectories (O’Brien 1989; Butler and Welch 2006; Pauketat 2007; Holt 2009). In fact, debates drawing upon the ‘stateliness’ of Downloaded by [Bowdoin College] at 04:32 29 June 2013 monumental architecture are common elements in archaeological reconstructions in many parts of the world. We believe that research on public architecture should probe intermediate scales of construction that do not necessarily stem from ranked societies, but that are indicative of new social and economic priorities that might foster new forms of social organisation. At present, the concept of heterarchy is a popular explanatory trope in Africanist archaeology, perhaps even too much associated with the continent in global surveys of the archaeology of complex societies (MacEachern in review). Its undoubted utility should not, however, blind researchers to the existence of social and political ranking in ancient communities, even in areas where such ranking may not exist or may take very different forms today. It is useful to ask what such intermediate scales of public construction might represent, in terms of what they symbolised and what social values they might have helped perpetuate. Equally intriguing is the extent to which such constructions reflect competition versus 244 S. MacEachern and N. David

co-operation within and between groups, and hierarchical versus heterarchical social organisation, as well as the roles of such constructions in regional interaction systems where they might have disparate significances for very differently organised communities. This may be an especially significant issue in the northern Mandara Mountains, given the region’s very complex history. As we have noted, that history includes a variety of different sociopolitical expressions of common regional cultural systems, a story of dynamism and adaptation to challenging environments that seems difficult to fit into simple evolutionary classifications (David 1996; David and Sterner 1999; MacEachern 2002). In addition, the relatively small size and high population densities of the region, coupled with collisions and borrowings between indigenous cultural structures and the very different systems in use in plains states around the northern massif, mean that particular places and institutions could have ritual and political influence extending considerably beyond their own environs. This raises questions about what such influence would have amounted to in real terms. Thus, for example, the regional influence and sociopolitical hierarchy of both the Gudur and Sukur mountain communities seem to have been overestimated * rhetorically in Mandara traditions and analytically by some researchers in the region (see Smith and David 1995; David and Sterner 2009; cf. Kirk-Greene 1960; Seignobos 1991). On the other hand, the significant montagnard borrowing and transformation of administrative terms from plains states (Sterner 2003: 218221), and the complex overlaps of political power between ethnic groups and communities in and around the Wandala polity north of the Mandara Mountains from the fifteenth century AD onward (Mohammadou 1982; MacEachern 1993b, in press), testify to the potential of regional networks to involve * or at least to interest * very different populations. Any evaluation of the role of the DGB sites, as monumental architecture or more generally, will thus have to keep these different questions in mind. First, what were they used for, bearing in mind probable variability in function across space and time? Second, to whom were these sites important, locally and (perhaps) regionally? And third, how may we use these data to gain insight into the sociocultural systems within which the DGB sites were significant? Downloaded by [Bowdoin College] at 04:32 29 June 2013 Characteristics of the DGB sites The sixteen DGB sites are found within a restricted area of approximately 25 km2 on the heights of the northwestern Mandara massif (Figure 1). The basic architectural units on DGB sites are platforms and terraces, most often it appears built up in successive building phases and constructed at least in part using a distinctive fine dry-stone walling technique (Figure 2). Other features include staircases, passage- ways, internal chambers, silos and courtyards (Figure 3). The most impressive portion of the largest site, DGB-1 at Kuva, was briefly described some 30 years ago (Seignobos 1982b), but no detailed analysis took place until Nic David, Gerhard Mu¨ller-Kosack and colleagues began survey of the sites and excavation (on DGB-2 and DGB-8) in 20012004 (David 2008: 36). In 2007, the authors visited the sites together, and since 2008 MacEachern has directed excavations on and around DGB-1 (MacEachern et al. 2010, 2012). Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa 245

Figure 1. The DGB sites in the Mandara Mountains, Cameroon.

DGB-1 and DGB-2 are only 100 m apart, and radiocarbon dating has established, if not entire contemporaneity between the two, then at least a substantial degree of overlap. Seventeen dates from DGB-1 establish occupation during the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries AD, while the one reliable date from DGB-2 is of the fifteenth century. Given their close proximity and substantial architectural and artefactual similarities, DGB-1 and DGB-2 can be considered as a single monumental site complex extending over an area of about 4 ha, with just over half of that area covered by the platforms and terraces that are characteristic of the Downloaded by [Bowdoin College] at 04:32 29 June 2013 DGB sites. The other DGB sites are significantly smaller; none has a confirmed area more than a quarter that of the DGB-1/-2 site complex, though DGB-7 is not much smaller in area than DGB-1 (David 2008: 1617, Table 2.1), and none is demonstrably as complex architecturally (although complexity is primarily revealed through excavation). The architectural features of DGB-1 and DGB-2 for the most part duplicate one another, with DGB-1 built on a larger scale and with more repetition of the basic architectural units noted above. There is evidence for a more diverse range of activities, including residential occupations, taking place in different parts of the DGB-1 site, but that may be in part due to its much greater size. Their functions do not therefore appear to have been complementary, at least as far as ceremony is concerned, and thus we cannot as yet speak of them as an integrated functioning site. The proximity of the two sites might, as David (2008: 104104, 136142) has suggested, be explained in terms of an increase in scale, with the smaller DGB-2 246 S. MacEachern and N. David

Figure 2. DGB-1, with walling.

becoming inadequate to fulfil a set of ceremonial functions that were then taken over by DGB-1. The earliest radiocarbon dates on DGB-1 (those before cal. AD 1400) are for the most part from units that yield DGB ceramics and domestic materials, but none of these is on the built-up central part of the site where the most spectacular architecture and evidence for both ceremonial and domestic activities has been found. Dates from the latter areas are either contemporary with the single date from DGB-2, or later. Resolving this issue will require more data on and dates for construction sequences from both sites. DGB-2 was constructed in three major phases and DGB-1 appears to have been built up through time in an even more Downloaded by [Bowdoin College] at 04:32 29 June 2013 complex sequence, with multiple phases of construction associated with platforms, terraces and other features (David 2008: 3742; MacEachern et al. 2010). A number of explanations have been offered for the functions of the DGB sites. David (2008) has been able conclusively to reject the hypotheses that the sites were defensive in nature, or that they were mausolea containing a succession of important burials. Neither are they primarily domestic in nature, for example residences of chiefs that apply the higher senior trope to household architecture common in the Mandara region and beyond. David and his colleagues have, on the other hand, employed their extensive familiarity with modern Mandara montagnard cultural and ritual practices to identify elements that may be related to the performance of rituals associated with water and fecundity (David 2008: 107112). Given a fifteenth- century AD date associated with the main phase of use/early abandonment of the DGB-2 and -8 sites, they identified them as responses to a very serious drought that afflicted the southern Lake Chad Basin during the same period (Brunk and Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa 247

Figure 3. Platforms and terraces at DGB-2.

Gronenborn 2004). This takes account of a whole variety of site features and firmly locates the DGB sites as a coherent cultural ensemble in relation to modern Mandara montagnard practice. There are also artefactual, especially ceramic,

Downloaded by [Bowdoin College] at 04:32 29 June 2013 similarities between materials recovered from the DGB sites and modern montagnard material culture, although the Mafa themselves deny that they were the builders of the sites and have constructed legends to account for them that conflate their experiences of colonial and other external powers (Mu¨ller-Kosack 2008: 115 119; Sterner 2008). The extended period of construction and occupation indicated by excavations and dates from DGB-1 indicates that an association with an early fifteenth-century AD drought is not the entire explanation for its construction. Our excavations indicate the variety of activities that went on around the DGB-1/-2 site complex during its period of occupation: people lived there, some of them engaged in ritual activities (for example, involving the cooking of meat in a central courtyard of DGB- 1), they buried caches on both sites and, of course, they built and remodelled the various architectural features through time (David 2008; MacEachern et al. 2010). The absence of domestic remains on DGB-2 itself and on DGB-8 indicates that some 248 S. MacEachern and N. David

living sites of the DGB culture remain to be located, if indeed coherent sites of this age still exist in a landscape that is thoroughly and repeatedly reworked in the course of terracing and intensive agriculture that prizes abandoned compounds for their high fertility. MacEachern’s research over the last two decades has been primarily in the archaeology of political and ethnic formations in this region, especially in the plains and inselbergs around the Mandara Mountains (MacEachern 2012b, 2012c, in press). He emphasises the potential role of the DGB-1/-2 site complex in relations with developing contemporary plains states. This would especially involve the Wandala polity2, with its first centre at Keroua only 32 km to the north-northeast from (probably) the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries AD. MacEachern also tends to focus on external connections and the role of these sites in regional power relations because of: (a) the discovery of small amounts of exotic artefacts (glazed ceramics, glass beads, loop-in-loop metal chain) during excavations at DGB-13, and (b) the disproportionate size of the DGB-1/-2 site complex in comparison to all of the other DGB sites. David, while recognising the legitimacy of that perspective and the likelihood of such a relationship, is as yet unconvinced by the evidence. While the existence of domestic materials at DGB-1 is indisputable, it as yet remains a possibility that the ritual-related architecture of DGB-1 was built and utilised * following a ceremonial closure of DGB-2 and transfer of its ritual functions to the larger site * in the sixteenth century during a second drought (David 2008: 56, 136 146). The energetics of DGB-1 construction as modelled by David and Richardson (David 2008: 12536) in any case suggest that its impressive size and elaboration afforded it a social/culture/political role in the region qualitatively different from any of the other, generally much smaller, DGB sites. We can thus say a good deal about the activities that people undertook on the DGB sites, but this gets us only partway toward an understanding of why they were built. As noted above, we need to envision parallel though inter-related sets of processes being played out through the sites, the first firmly founded in the Mandara montagnard geographic and socio-cultural milieu, the second reaching outwards to the north, towards plains-edge communities like that at Keroua that were themselves becoming integrated into more complex and internationally oriented networks of economic and political exchange. It may also be the case that Mandara montagnard societies were evolving toward their present forms over this period as well, rendering Downloaded by [Bowdoin College] at 04:32 29 June 2013 the whole process even more complicated and interesting.

Definition and integration of the DGB sites in their landscapes Any evaluations of the uses of the 16 DGB sites must begin with an account of how they are defined as a group. Sites were originally identified as DGB based on four categories of features: architecture, location, artefactual remains and oral traditions associated with the sites (David 2008: 917)4. Architecturally, all of the DGB sites are characterised by the existence of one or more platforms and/or terraces, with the latter being common features in Mandara Mountains landscapes (see below). Staircases, passages, silos built into platforms in the course of their construction and major masonry or boulder-built terraces are other characteristic features of the DGB sites, but are not found on every site (Table 1). Somewhat similar though stylistically distinct features are found on other kinds of site in the area (see below). The most Table 1. Attributes of DGB sites (all are recognised as DGB sites by their Mafa neighbours).

Platform(s) with one Passage Major terrace(s) DGB ceramics Location Site DGB or more adjoining L stone Built-in M masonry Domestic present Approach P prominent No. Fac¸ade platforms or terraces lintel(s) staircase Silo B Boulder features many Stairway V wide view 1 L M Midden PV 2 L M PV

3 V Africa in Research Archaeological Azania: 4 ?? V 5 PV 6 ?PV 7 PV 8 L V 9 V 10 B PV 11 B? V 12 B PV 13 PV 14 15 L PV 16 ? B PV Downloaded by [Bowdoin College] at 04:32 29 June 2013 June 2013 29 at 04:32 College] by [Bowdoin Downloaded 249 250 S. MacEachern and N. David Downloaded by [Bowdoin College] at 04:32 29 June 2013

Figure 4. DGB fac¸ade, east wall of North Central Platform, DGB-1 (photograph courtesy of Owen Murray).

easily recognised characteristic used to identify DGB sites is the flat, carefully constructed dry-stone fac¸ade with plane faces of blocks laid in an approximation of coursing and rock wedges inserted to fill in interstices (David 2008: 67). These occur, even if only partially preserved, on almost all sites, and help to make the DGB-1, -2 and -7 sites such visually arresting architectural compositions (Figure 4). Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa 251

As David (2008: 104105) notes, this particular method of dry stone construction * referred to hereafter as ‘DGB fac¸ades’ * is not characteristic of modern Mafa architecture and is stylistically distinct from the walling of all other known populations past and present in the Mandara Mountains5. A particular set of artefacts, especially ceramics, are also characteristic of DGB sites, although such materials are also encountered away from sites on the mountain landscape and as such did not figure in the initial definition of the 16 DGB sites. Finally, oral histories are associated with the broad concept of ‘diy-ged-bay’ sites and with the Mafa traditions associated with their (pre-Mafa) builders, but there is not a complete concordance between places identified by Mafa as diy-ged-bay and the architectural features, especially DGB fac¸ades, associated with DGB sites. Two sites (DGB-5 and -9) identified as diy-ged-bay by modern Mafa have little or no trace of DGB walling. The much-terraced DGB-5 is identified as a DGB site on the grounds of its typically prominent placement in the landscape and oral tradition, the latter supplemented by the claim of a resident that one of his forefathers had discovered two iron artefacts, one complete, near the site; these are best interpreted as early forms of the iron bars widely manufactured in the Downloaded by [Bowdoin College] at 04:32 29 June 2013

Figure 5. Iron objects from DGB-1 cache (above object C2) and from the vicinity of DGB-5 (below). 252 S. MacEachern and N. David

region and used as convenient tool blanks, and in economic and social exchanges, during the ethnographic present. The complete artefact has a socketed end and resembles in some ways artefacts with the morphology of projectile point pre-forms from a cache of iron objects found on the DGB-1 site (Figure 5) (David 2008: 106; MacEachern et al. in press). The DGB-1 cache also included socketed objects of uncertain function, two of which were also found at DGB-2. DGB-9 is very small and much rebuilt, yet shows a meeting of two curved façades indicating that it comprises a platform with an adjoining structure. It too is locally identified as a DGB site. It would thus seem that indigenous DGB identifications are unlikely to be due to any perceived benefits of identifying sites of interest to archaeologists, or to different criteria used by archaeologists and by local people in identifying significant places in the landscape. The broader question of the identification of DGB sites continues to pose challenges for archaeologists. First, dry-stone DGB walling will degrade through time, as it has at all sites where it has been identified, and sites on the scale of the smallest of the DGB sites could have disappeared through decay, reuse and recycling. However, a considerable number of other features are associated with DGB sites in patterned ways (Table 1) and these associations are not characteristic of sites that lack DGB façades. David and colleagues have intensively searched and inquired both within and extensively beyond the presently known distribution of DGB sites and are reasonably confident that the Oupay massif and its outliers contain no further sites that fit that definition. It is certainly possible that other sites, either DGB themselves or with cultural and/or material connections to the DGB phenomenon, occur elsewhere and appear stylistically different, if only on account of different geology and availability of raw materials. Even more important is the question of the functioning of these sites in their Mandara context. DGB façades give us a strong indication that a site is indeed a DGB site and to confirm that we have made use of a number of other criteria: site location, architectural morphology, types of features present, ceramics and popular identification. Taken together, these various lines of evidence give us considerable confidence in the identification of particular architectural complexes in the mountain landscape as DGB sites. This does not mean, however, that all DGB sites are necessarily of identical function: a formal typology (David 2008: 32 [Table 2.2]) provisionally distinguishes five different categories among the known sites, based Downloaded by [Bowdoin College] at 04:32 29 June 2013 upon the distribution of platforms and terraces, with a sixth category * DGB residential sites lacking any monumental features * expected but to this point not yet located. This variation underscores the complexity of the DGB phenomenon and probably indicates the diversity of roles that these sites played within the communities of their builders. David (2008: 32) notes the architectural articulation of the sites with their immediate surroundings, implying the potential impingement of both agricultural and residential functions on the ceremonial roles of the sites and vice versa. This brings us back to the question of the ways in which the DGB sites were embedded in their contemporary cultural landscapes. We know almost nothing of wider patterns of occupation of the Mandara Mountains landscape during the broad period of occupation of the sites (the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries AD), and so this is a significant problem (MacEachern 2012a, 2012b). DGB potsherds can be found away from DGB sites themselves, but the necessary Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa 253

investment of effort that we have made on the localities associated with DGB fac¸ades makes evaluation of scattered and fragmentary off-site ceramic finds difficult The next question becomes, then: how might we begin to understand the roles that the DGB sites played within their larger human landscapes, especially given that, at least at present, these landscapes are themselves charged with aspects of cultural significance?

Monumental sites and Mandara landscapes This question raises two challenging issues. The first of these is archaeological and will be addressed in the next section: at this point, we do not know what Mandara landscapes were like when the sites were constructed and used. The second is more immediate and is to some degree a question of interpretation. The DGB sites exist now within human landscapes that constrain and influence our understandings of their existence and functions. They are ancient monumental sites within an intensely occupied and domesticated modern mountain environment, one impregnated with cultural meaning. As Hildebrand (2012, 2013) notes, simple dichotomies of ‘monumental’ structures and a more or less ‘prosaic’ built environment may in many cases be misleading: monumental constructions frequently confer sacral or cultural status upon their surroundings * monumentality bleeding out into the landscape * while appreciations of the monumental nature of structures are to some degree conditioned by those same surroundings. Mandara landscapes are hardly ‘prosaic’, and they need to be considered both as settings for the DGB sites and as active agents conditioning our interpretations of those sites. The modern northern Mandara landscape is intensively exploited, supporting population densities of up to 250 people/km2. It is dominated by impressive examples of stone architecture, especially in the agricultural terraces and domestic structures that are such significant features of areal panoramas. The anthropic contribution to the landscape is based upon built stone, albeit not always dry-stone architecture as on the DGB sites (Melchisedek 2010). In the Oujila area of Podokwo territory, through much of the northeastern Mandara Mountains south of Mora, and around the DGB sites, the terraces seen from below appear to form continuous dry-stone walls reaching to the heights of hills and crests (Figure 6), and satellite imagery seems to come with contour lines already added (Figure 7). Homesteads of Downloaded by [Bowdoin College] at 04:32 29 June 2013 stone, daub and wood are liberally scattered among and around the terraces. These houses are constructed with considerable care and, in the cases of the houses of chiefs and other important people, can be impressively large and complex. They can themselves blur the dividing line between ‘public’ and ‘private’ and between ‘monumental’ and ‘prosaic’ architecture in very complex ways. The residence of the chief of Sukur, just across the border in Nigeria, is perhaps the best attested example (Smith and David 1995; MacEachern 2002; see also Seignobos 1982a). There is no easy way of separating this modern domestic landscape from the physical reality of the DGB sites. The platforms and terraces of most of the latter are today exploited as surfaces for farming and the DGB walls (like all other man-made constructions in the region) are subject to reuse and recycling if and when the requirements of agriculture and land use demand it, although Mafa attitudes, respectful verging on fearful, towards the sites and their presumed makers deter casual destruction and encourage conservation. The domestic architecture found 254 S. MacEachern and N. David

Figure 6. Landscapes of stone near Mayo Plata, northeastern Mandara Mountains.

during excavation at DGB-1 and contemporary with the overall period of use of the site did not incorporate DGB fac¸ades, but was instead comparable to modern domestic architecture. Thus, there was and is a continuum of expertise and care between the exceptional DGB walling that defines the DGB sites and the domestic walling that still today forms the fabric of everyday montagnard existence. That Downloaded by [Bowdoin College] at 04:32 29 June 2013 would seem to have been the case when the sites were constructed: the extraordinary expertise obvious in the construction of the DGB sites testifies to an accumulated familiarity with construction in stone already possessed by its builders, a familiarity probably resulting from generations of experience with domestic architecture and terraces. Where then did DGB fac¸ades end and the walls of the households and terraces that might have surrounded them begin? This modern built landscape is more than a simple agglomeration of individual and family landholdings: it is intrinsic to Mandara montagnard self-definitions. For the Mafa people who live around the DGB sites, creation stories identify stone as the original staple food (Mu¨ller-Kosack 2003: 103), hardened and made inedible only when impurity came into the world. Montagnards are ‘people of the rocks’ (de Colombel 1986: 15; Vincent 1991: 5763; MacEachern 2002: 201), people set apart from the populations of the stone-poor plains that surround the Mandara Mountains, who build primarily in daub and who have done so for at least the zna rhelgclRsac nAfrica in Research Archaeological Azania: Downloaded by [Bowdoin College] at 04:32 29 June 2013 June 2013 29 at 04:32 College] by [Bowdoin Downloaded

Figure 7. Terraces on satellite imagery around DGB-1/-2. 255 256 S. MacEachern and N. David

last two to three millennia (MacEachern 2012a). Definitions of identity frequently recall different built points on this rocky landscape, including houses and burial places marked by stones (MacEachern 2002), while rocks, whether shaped by nature or humans, either isolated or built into terrace features, are associated with powerful spirits of place and are often points of sacrifice (Tchandeu 2010). Even today, after decades of government-imposed peace and as some people leave the mountains for village life in the plains below, montagnard people often talk with resignation about the challenges of life in this environment, but also with evident pride and comfort about the sustenance and protection that this domesticated landscape makes possible. Its ensemble of constructions provides a physical framework of meaning for a distinctively montagnard way of life. In this complex and impressive environment, a distinction between ‘monumental’ and ‘prosaic’ architecture is, as we have said, rather less than useful. The DGB sites are not the only localities in the area with imposing, even monumental, stone architecture, although they are the best described and, in the case of the DGB-1/-2 complex, certainly the most imposing. Constructions associated with political power can be extremely striking, as is the case for example with the chiefly architecture and paved ways at Sukur noted above (Smith and David 1995), and with the ‘chaˆteaux’ of the Mofu-Diamare´‘princes’ to the southeast (Vincent 1991). These sites share some architectural features in common with the DGB sites (stone stairways and lintels, careful construction of walls, and so on), but they do not have the distinctive associations of DGB façades, platforms, passages that sometimes go nowhere, staircases and silos. They are chiefly domestic sites with ceremonial/ ritual attributes: they are impressive, but they are clearly not DGB sites. There are also a significant number of abandoned archaeological sites scattered around the peripheries of the mountains that show features and characteristics comparable to DGB sites. These include Greá Tlala-Mafa (PMW 603), situated on the Greá inselberg north of the Mandara massif itself and interestingly associated with Mafa people, and the Garrvi Guza Pulke site (PMW 740), on the northwestern extremity of the massif in Nigeria (MacEachern 1993a); both have extensive walling and stairways, features often associated with the DGB sites. A graduate student working with MacEachern, Re´becca Janson, has recently located and described two significant sites northwest of DGB-1/-2 and about halfway between that site complex and the one-time plains capital of the Wandala state at Keroua, on the Nigeria/ Downloaded by [Bowdoin College] at 04:32 29 June 2013 Cameroon border (Figure 8). These sites include platforms, staircases and arrange- ments of standing stone uprights, as well as the remains of domestic architecture. They do not have the distinctive DGB façades (or at least to this point none have been found), but they certainly compare in size and complexity with at least some of the DGB sites.

Monumentality in a prehistoric Mandara landscape We may agree that the monumentality of the DGB sites cannot be interpreted as if excised from the context of their modern surroundings, since those surroundings are themselves to a great degree constructed by humans and charged with cultural meaning. Such questions must also be addressed when considering the meaning and function of the DGB sites when occupied, and their integration with their contemporary landscape. However, this begs the question of the relationships Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa 257

Figure 8. Mountain-edge site near Djibrile´, between DGB-1/-2 and Keroua.

between the dated DGB sites (that is, so far only DGB-1/-2 and -8) and the other features of that prehistoric landscape. In what kind of environment did the DGB sites exist during their period of construction and use, say from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries AD? Was it a human landscape similar to that that exists in the region today, where the sites themselves would have been embedded in a visually and culturally impressive array of terraces, houses and related architecture, or were they more isolated monuments, deriving their imposing nature and/or function from the way in which they existed within an environment much less impacted by human activity (at least in an architectural sense)? Were the cultural and political relations between mountain and plains people as complicated 500600 years ago as they would become in more recent periods (MacEachern 1993b), or had the identities of Downloaded by [Bowdoin College] at 04:32 29 June 2013 montagnards and plains-dwellers not yet fully differentiated? Were these places, with their DGB walling and complex architectural features, seen as places apart from other localities, as they are by modern archaeologists and heritage planners, or were they more intimately embedded in the day-to-day experiences of people around the site? Such questions are, of course, hardly unique to the monuments of Central Africa (cf. Darvill 2007). To this point, we have relatively few data that will help us answer these questions. The antiquity of the terrace systems that make up the bones of the modern montagnard cultural landscape is at present unknown. Excavation on a midden area integrated into a terrace system at the Ngoye Kirawa (PMW 755) site, on the edge of the Kirawa inselberg, yielded a date of cal. AD 7801020 (MacEachern 2012a), while similar excavations on a terrace near DGB-2 did not yield useful results, with early and late first millennium AD dates reversed. Disturbance in these relatively shallow stratigraphies will probably make dating of the terrace system in this area difficult. 258 S. MacEachern and N. David

Excavations on DGB-1 itself provided some ambiguous evidence that occupation in one area of the site in the thirteenth century AD might have predated terrace construction in that location (MacEachern et al. 2010). The characteristics of the dated DGB sites themselves provide some insight into their origins. The DGB sites are very much a montagnard phenomenon: there is no evidence for habitation sites in the neighbouring plains whose inhabitants could be responsible for their construction and the layout and the striking skill in dry-stone architecture demonstrated by their builders would, in any case, have been more or less irrelevant on the plains. Masters of dry-stone construction built them, and their distinctiveness implies that their builders had already occupied and explored the architectural potential of the mountain landscape for some extended period of time. This suggests that the cultural and political separation between mountain and plains people had already begun * and was probably already complicated and ambivalent even five centuries or more ago, as it would be in later times (MacEachern 1993b). It is also the case that, despite their prominent positions in the topography (DGB-14 being an exception), all the DGB sites are located in or next to land that would have required relatively little terracing. Some terracing in proximity to certain sites, DGB-6 for example, appears particularly fine and may well originate in DGB times. It seems likely therefore that the sites existed within a milieu whose inhabitants had already begun the processes that would lead to the domesticated mountain landscapes of the modern period, and that we must, again, consider them not as isolated and striking monuments, but as places that played an active role in the lives of their makers * impressive structures in a built landscape impregnated with cultural and symbolic meaning, a landscape in some aspects on its way to becoming ‘monumental’ itself.

Conclusion At the beginning of this paper, we asked three questions about the DGB sites: what were they used for; to whom were they important; and how can we use our research to gain insight into the sociocultural systems within which they were significant? We now know far more than we did 15 years ago, but are still only partway toward answering those questions. We know that, in some cases at least, residential structures were closely associated with DGB architecture, that a variety of ritual Downloaded by [Bowdoin College] at 04:32 29 June 2013 activities took place on the sites, and that at least some of those rituals were probably associated with ideas of water and fecundity. We know that the sites were in use during a period of climatic crisis and political upheaval in the fifteenth century AD and that, most unusually for the region, they yield small amounts of material deriving from outside the Lake Chad Basin. This implies their local origins and their significance to builders who had cultural connections to modern Mafa, but also their articulation with wider cultural and economic systems south of Lake Chad. The details of what those significances and articulations remain to be addressed by future research. This will involve, first, further examination of the internal variability of the DGB site set, not merely the DGB-1/-2 site complex in comparison to other, smaller DGB sites, but also among those smaller sites. It will also involve further research on the prehistoric landscape within which the sites were embedded, most immediately, we hope, through geoarchaeological fieldwork examining the origins of agricultural terrace systems. Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa 259

Understanding the DGB sites will also require locating and examining contemporary archaeological sites, whether monumental or not, known from different areas of the Mandara massif, to establish both their temporal and their cultural relations with he DGB sites. The latter are certainly a distinct cultural phenomenon, but they need to be placed within the larger framework of montagnard stone architecture. Those of use who have worked on the 16 DGB sites, struck by their impressiveness, have tended to emphasise the features that set them apart from their surroundings. Recognition of the distinctiveness of the DGB sites has led to their inclusion on a Cameroonian Tentative List for World Heritage designation. It is notable that Sukur, culturally very comparable and just across the international frontier in Nigeria, has already been designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Cultural Landscape perhaps a better way to think of the DGB sites as well. MacEachern (2013) has recently argued that that the history of Western contact and ethnographic/archaeological research in the southern Lake Chad Basin has led to a situation where the topographical dichotomy between mountains and plains has been reformulated and represented in cultural and archaeological terms. The northern Mandara Mountains are often interpreted as cultural landscapes of unknown antiquity, with little consideration of specific human activities in those landscapes (because almost no archaeological evidence for such ancient activities existed until recently), while habitation on the plains around them has been conceived of in terms of foci of human activities throughout an array of settlements (that is, the archaeological sites that have already been located and investigated by a number of researchers, including both of the present authors). This asymmetry has tended to localise models of historical process and agency on the plains, and not merely on the plains but in certain kinds of culturalised localities in the plains, including inselbergs and the settlement mounds that often adjoin them. This is, of course, an outsiders’ viewpoint, one that discounts the experience of local people (especially montagnards) with the rich biographies and histories of their own landscapes. In many ways, our difficulties with the DGB sites exist because they break this analytical dichotomy: they are distinctive archaeological sites, but they are situated in a dense mountain cultural landscape of essentially unknown time-depth and where models of historical agency are not well developed. It will require further

Downloaded by [Bowdoin College] at 04:32 29 June 2013 work to understand the different ways in which these sites would have worked for the people who built them, who lived on and around them and who eventually inherited them as significant points on the landscape.

Acknowledgements We should like to thank the many different people who have helped us in ﬁeld research in northern Cameroon and northern Nigeria over almost 30 years, especially those members of Mandara communities who have been so generous with their time, their information and their help in our work. We should also like to thank Lisa Hildebrand, Matt Davies and two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments. The research behind this paper has been supported through grants from the National Science Foundation (Research Grant # 0743058 [MacEachern]), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Research Grants 410-83-0819 [David], 410-85-1040 [David], 410-88-0361 [David], 410-92- 1860 [MacEachern] and 410-95-0379 [MacEachern]), and the National Geographic Society (MacEachern). 260 S. MacEachern and N. David

Notes 1. DGB stands for ‘diy-ged-bay’,or‘ruins of chiefly residence’ in the Chadic Mafa language now spoken in northern Cameroon. 2. From the seventeenth century AD onward, we can safely refer to Wandala as a state, albeit for the most part a small state under pressure from more powerful competitors around the Lake Chad Basin. Its exact political status two centuries earlier, when the use of the DGB sites was most intensive, is more difficult to define, but it was certainly a small, plains-based polity with at least one main town at Keroua. The point at which a ‘polity’ becomes a ‘state’ is to some degree a question of terminologies. 3. A single cuprous button-like artefact is the only exotic artefact recovered from DGB-2 (David 2008: 9495). 4. It should be remembered that diy-ged-bay is actually a modern Mafa term, used to identify a certain category of place on the landscape that figures into Mafa conceptions of their cultural heritage (Datouang Djoussou 2011). 5. The most similar façade of which we are aware occurs in the ‘chaˆteau’ of the Mofu ‘prince’ of Wazang, a chiefly residence located on a hilltop in part for defensive reasons.

Notes on contributors Scott MacEachern is Professor of Anthropology at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, United States of America. Most of his research since the mid-1980s has taken place around the Mandara Mountains of northern Cameroon and Nigeria and he is currently working on the excavation of Iron Age sites in that region. His main research interests are in state formation processes in Africa, the archaeological study of ethnicity and social boundaries, African cultural heritage management issues and African and global historical genetics.

Nic David (http://homepages.ucalgary.ca/Ândavid/Homepage/) is Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at the University of Calgary. He directed the Mandara Archaeological Project in Cameroon and Nigeria from 1984 to 2008, combining ethnoarchaeological, archaeological and other research. He has numerous publications to his credit including video programs such as The 13 Months of Sukur: Africa’s First World Heritage Cultural Landscape (2010), and the edited volume Metals in Mandara Mountains Society and Culture (2012).

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