Investigating Africa’s Largest Structures: Construction and Cosmologies of African Earthworks, and Comparison with Diasporic Landscapes

• In Event: Materialities of Earthwork Cultural Landscapes in the Black Atlantic: Technologies, Architectures, and Cosmologies

Description for Program

West African earthworks – the linear banks and ditches enclosing often vast expanses of territory – comprise some of the largest monumental structures on earth, with the Benin-Ishan network estimated to be thousands of miles in length, and the single example of Sungbo’s Eredo being over 100 miles in circumference. Such structures are some of the best-preserved examples of African architecture, and were constructed from the 1st millennium BC to 19th century AD across the continent. Despite increasing academic interest in the chronologies, construction, functions, and meanings of these structures, the materiality of these has been relatively little investigated, with only a handful of archaeological excavations having studied their architecture, configuration, and use. Furthermore, given that such earthwork-building societies were often those from which enslaved people were taken to the Americas, there is ample potential in comparative approaches that seek to explore what aspects of these technologies and cosmologies may have been transplanted across the Atlantic World, and how they may have converged and/or contrasted with those of Indigenous and European groups, also involved in constructing earthen mounds, trenches, irrigation, and canals for a variety of purposes. This talk lays out some of the main findings of my recent archaeological and archival research conducted on several earthworks in southern Nigeria, focusing on the Sungbo’s Eredo earthwork (Lagos State), Benin City earthwork (Edo State), and Ile-Ife earthwork (Osun State). It discusses the technologies, architectures, and social relations pertaining to the construction of these massive monumental structures, and further considers their functional and cosmological importance in shaping the realities of generations of people. In doing so, the talk seeks to foster new dialogues with scholars working on earthworks in the African diaspora, with the aim of developing novel conclusions about the contribution of Africans to the transformation of landscapes in the Americas.

Author

• Tomos Evans, Washington University in St. Louis