9
Efficacious Objects and Techniques of the Subject
“Ornaments” and Their Depositional Contexts in Banda, Ghana
Ann B. Stahl
The performative actions through which West Africans ensure their well-being are often subsumed by analysts under the rubric of ritual and religion, but in practice a wide range of actions and media is involved. My central argument is that archaeological exploration of these practices requires contextualized analysis of things as diverse as “ornaments” and animal bones, as I illustrate through a case study centered on the Banda area of west-central Ghana. I proceed from the premise that we should consider practices of well-being as a condition of personhood. Whether engaging individuals, families, or broader collectives, actions centered on well-being relationally engage bodies of varying form (humans, animals, non-corporeal spirit beings) through diverse media (words, prepared food, drink, plant substances, objects). Practices may focus on individual bodies, as, for example, the wearing of amulets endowed with protective power. Others, like the pouring of libations accompanied by invocations, connect the living to their ancestral forbears, while those centered on shrines secure outcomes through the medium of things and offerings that attract spirit beings who possess the power to intercede in human affairs. While diverse in form, all these actions have a relational dimension and lived effects (Meyer and Houtman 2012).
Early descriptions of these practices by European merchants on the so-called Guinea coast were shaped by an emerging ontology that bifurcated first souls (Pietz 1987:28) and later minds from bodies and bodies from world (Espirito Santo and Tassi 2013). As explored in detail by Pietz (1985, 1987, 1988), these early perceptions laid the foundation for theories of “fetishism” (see also Meyer and Houtman 2012:14–15). Perceived as standing apart from “rational” activity (Taves and Bender 2012), they were long portrayed as the domain of “belief”—or, more condemningly, “superstition”—rather than efficacious practice. The cultural relativism that informed early twentieth-century ethnography produced less judgmental descriptions (e.g., Rattray 1927:1–24) that were continuous nonetheless, with the premise that these practices belonged to a religious domain and were part of enduring “tradition.” This elided the processes through which “the notion of traditional religion itself developed in the context of the encounter between Christian missionaries and indigenous priests” (Meyer 2012:91; also Meyer and Houtman 2012; Pietz 1985, 1987, 1988). It equally elided the ways West Africans responded to changing circumstances through improvisational practice (Barber 2007a; Ingold and Hallam 2007), a process archaeologists have recently begun to explore (Norman 2014; Ogundiran 2002, 2014; Richard 2010; Stahl 2002, 2008, 2015b). Mid-twentieth-century scholarship further solidified a dichotomous view of belief and practical action in its privileging of mind and language as sites of meaning making coupled with a view of religion as symbolic activity that “stands apart from the truly useful” (Keane 2010:190; see also Espirito Santo and Tassi 2013).
Recent scholarship has challenged these perspectives on diverse fronts. As richly exemplified in this volume, contemporary archaeologists take seriously relational ontological perspectives, directing analytical attention to the practices through which personhood and a state of well-being was secured vis-à-vis a broader landscape of nonhuman spirit beings (Harrison-Buck and Hendon, this volume). Yet we have paid less attention to how Western understandings of these “alternative” ontologies emerged. Scholars like Meyer (2012) and Pietz (1985, 1987, 1988, 1995) remind us that European understandings of non-European practice were shaped by historically specific intercultural interaction (also Bernault 2006). Vocabularies and concepts forged in processes of interaction were subsequently wrested from those contexts and taken to stand “in general” for non-Western societies. They were deployed in turn by missionaries, colonial officials, scholars, and colonized subjects as they negotiated practice and value in the colonial contexts from which ethnographers extrapolated “tradition.” Used comparatively (Stahl 1993, 2001:19–40; Wylie 2002), archaeology’s material evidence holds potential to illuminate these negotiations of personhood and well-being in genealogically connected (Gosden 2005:203–6) but dynamic ways (e.g., Keane 2010). But in doing so we need to be mindful of how these entangled conceptual and practical histories may be carried forward in our analytical vocabularies and frameworks (Bernault 2006; Espirito Santo and Tassi 2013; Meyer and Houtman 2012), a point no less pertinent to the concepts of relationality and personhood that are gaining purchase in contemporary scholarship (Fowler 2004:34).
In this chapter I build on recent literatures in African ethnography, history, and art history to explore how villagers of the western Volta River basin in Ghana negotiated well-being over several centuries of shifting interregional and intercontinental entanglements. Inspired by recent literature that explores how personhood emerges through bodily techniques and things in motion (e.g., Warnier 2007, 2011, 2012, 2013), I focus attention on bangles, rings, beads, and other objects typically classified as “ornaments,” a category that masks their agency in negotiations of well-being (see Glaze 1978). I use their itineraries or biographies as a pathway for discerning how these objects or things configured subjects and well-being through their actions on bodies (Loren 2010) but also through their circulations apart from them (see also Ogundiran 2002, 2014).1 I briefly situate the study in relation to literature that approaches personhood as a relational process in which things participate. A telescoped case study follows in which I explore how we can use the visual properties and depositional contexts of ornaments to illuminate their operations as efficacious objects in dynamic processes of well-being and personhood (Harrison-Buck and Hendon, this volume).
The Dynamics of Well-Being and Techniques of the Subject
A growing literature highlights the incorporative ethos and openness to new affordances (Knappett 2004) demonstrated by Africans as they improvised their practice in relation to shifting topologies of power, opportunity, and constraint, particularly those related to interregional and intercontinental entanglements over recent centuries (Allman and Parker 2005; Barber 2007a; Drewal 1996; Kodesh 2008; Meyer 1999; Norman 2014; Ogundiran 2014; Ogundiran and Saunders 2014; Schildkrout and Keim 1990:190–93; Trapido 2013). Objects newly available through emerging global connections were readily incorporated through what Guyer and Belinga (1995; also Doris 2011) characterize as “compositional” practice. Combined with attention to what Warnier (2007, 2009, 2012:331–32), following Mauss (1979), termed “techniques of the subject,” these literatures underscore the need to surmount an earlier preoccupation with verbalized meaning and knowledge to more fully understand how personhood is produced through a subject’s relations with things (Warnier 2007:8–9).
Warnier and others of the Matière à Penser (M à P) working group (Warnier 2007:22) have argued that objects, materials, and the actions through which relations are produced are part and parcel of techniques of the subject (Warnier 2007, 2009, 2012:331–32). Their approach builds on an earlier anthropology of techniques (e.g., Lemonnier 1992). However, M à P scholars are critical of the narrow focus on technique as “efficacious action on matter” that characterizes the “anthropology of techniques” approach (Warnier 2009:460, original emphasis), as they are of the tendency to treat ritual and symbolism as epiphenomenal and ideational (see also Keane 2003:410, 2008). M à P scholars argue that this narrowness undermined Mauss’s earlier intuition that techniques, as “efficacious action,” shape subjectivity (Warnier 2009:461) or, alternatively, personhood (Fowler 2004, 2010:364–74). Warnier’s project reclaims Mauss’s insight through a “unified anthropology of techniques” (Warnier 2009:469) that includes traditional and efficacious action on bodies (Warnier 2009:460, 465). Consistent with a broader project of surmounting the obdurate and artificial division between “ ‘spirit’ and ‘matter’ ” (Keane 2003:409), Warnier’s (2007) The Pot-King illuminates the “sensori-motor culture” through which persons are socially formed in relationship with things. In its phenomenological underpinnings, this focus bears resemblance to Munn’s analysis of Gawan kula exchange as an “action system” that coordinately produces “objective structures of the social world, and the specific forms of subjective experience” (Munn 1983:279). Persons are formed through gestures and sensory engagements with materials and objects, with ontological implications in that “men and women of different groups and in different walks of life are not made of the same stuff” (Warnier 2012:328, also 2011; Ingold 2011; Hendon, this volume). Here, we might extend this insight to take account of the principle of symmetry discussed by Harrison-Buck and Hendon (this volume), with the implication that not all objects or animals are “made of the same stuff.”
Among techniques of the subject, Mauss included practices of ritual, magic, and religion. Long viewed as the domain of symbol and meaning, logocentrically conceived, scholars increasingly recognize ritual as a realm of performative engagement with substances, nonhuman persons, and objects and thus as part of a broader “dialectic of people and things” (Meskell 2005:4) that is productive of embodied subjectivities and social relations (Bell 1992; Houtman and Meyer 2012). Within an African context, scholars further emphasize compositional practices—what in other contexts has been termed “bundling” (Keane 2003; Pauketat 2013; Zedeño 2008). For Keane (2003:414), bundling is about co-presence of qualities in an object that shifts its “relative value, utility, and relevance across contexts”; however, archaeologists and other scholars have used the concept to refer to compositions or assemblages of objects with distinct origins and qualities that in their combination possess affective power, as, for example, African shrines, which can range from single objects to complex compositions of diverse things and materials that are typically a site of offertory activity (see Doris 2011; Insoll 2013:167–68; Stahl 2008).
Warnier’s emphasis on subject making resonates with Wells’s (2012) recent exploration of the visual ecology of Bronze and Iron Age Europe as gleaned through its materiality. Building on Gibson’s ecological psychology, Wells describes visual perception as a relational process grounded in materiality, such that seeing “involves a person’s bodily experience of the world” (Wells 2012:21). He acknowledges shared properties of seeing: the role of lines in “framing,” the way curved lines create an illusion of movement, the role of texture in drawing attention to surfaces, and features that create “eye-catching” objects (Wells 2012:26–32). However, he argues the need to contextualize “seeing” and explore how visual ecology was reconfigured as people were exposed to new materials, objects, styles, and what Gibson termed “affordances” (Wells 2012:32), a relational quality of objects vis-à-vis their surroundings that offers possibilities for action. By examining commonalities, distinctions, and specificities in the visual aspects of different kinds of late prehistoric European artifacts (pottery, metal objects) and contexts (burials, settlements), Wells identifies changes in the visual world involving color, standardization of form, and the framing of visual fields as Europeans participated in broader networks of commercial activity and wider spheres of object circulations. His study thus reminds us that visuality is among the techniques of the subject to whose temporality we should be attuned.
Wells’s attention to the visual ecology of objects can in turn be enriched by Robb’s (2015:166) discussion of what he terms “object design as a middle range theory of material culture.” Robb highlights the ways elements of an object’s design can cue users into responses; for instance, the fly motif painted on the men’s urinal in Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport that compels action as a target or Gell’s (1992) oft-cited reference to the Trobriand Islanders’ boat prow that exemplifies what Gell terms a technology of enchantment. Focusing analysis on design features, seen through the lens of emplaced convention rather than “universal” logic, “locates efficacy in material things themselves and how they incorporate and guide anticipated responses . . . pinning down exactly how material actants are active” (Robb 2015:169). Robb encourages us to study the flows of action in which people and things are enmeshed, as I endeavor to do below in considering how ornaments operate in relation to both bodies and the shrine bundles into which they were sometimes incorporated.
Urging us to augment theory with analytical method, Robb focuses on how an object’s design cues prompt efficacious social action. He highlights five among a range of processes that can be cued: enchantment, irresistibility, disruption, standard setting, and objects that, through their exceptional qualities, act as a “cognitive trap” or magical entity. The first evokes effects through its qualities—the canoe prow of Gell’s Trobriand example; the second operates as definitive “key symbols” (Robb 2015:172) understood through foundational values, often objects that operate as prestige goods; the third ritually disrupts, for example, through inversions of the “normal”; standard setters “assert standards” as part of “low-key normality” or habitus (Robb 2015:170); and the last, through their exceptional qualities, provoke fascination, sometimes by contradiction, as, for example, the use of fossils or ancient stone tools in ritual (see Brück and Jones, this volume) or the incorporation of “anomalous bodies” of twins or dwarfs, among other possibilities (Robb 2015:173). Such design elements and their cues provide, along with insights into the affordances of their composite materials and their use contexts, a methodological “way in” to better understand how material things achieve effects—in short, to how they become efficacious objects, whether in isolation or combinations, as I explore below.
Finally, Keane’s (2003, 2010) perspectives on “marking” and “bundling” as material semiotic processes (see Crossland 2015 for a discussion) usefully augment these perspectives on how objects cue action with ontological effects, whether by shaping visual ecology (Wells 2012) or through their role in sensori-motor culture (Warnier 2012). Building on Peircean realism, Keane underscores the role of objects as mediators of social processes, not as mere signs to be read but rather as “an instigation to certain sorts of action” that are “subject to historical dynamics” (Keane 2003:418–19, original emphasis). As such, he offers tools that help us appreciate semiotic ideology as a social and historical process and objects as “part of the shared experiences and actions that mediate sociality” (Keane 2010:194). Marking is one such process. Marking trains attention by setting off an object, a context, or an action as unusual in relation to what is received as “normal.” Marking makes these a focus for special attention and therefore makes them available for debate, action, and potentially new purposes without necessarily compelling these purposes. As such, marking can provide a source of creative action and innovation (Keane 2008:S113; e.g., Schoenbrun 2016). Bundling, too, builds on both the history and potential of semiotic forms, yielding combinations or “assemblages” that are the “outcome of contingent factors of historical context” (Keane 2008:S115), which in turn are available as affordances for future action.
As these and other literatures (Harrison-Buck and Hendon, this volume) demonstrate, we have seen growing awareness of objects’ subject-forming power and their role in producing and shaping relations between humans and nonhumans, alongside methodological innovations in how to study these processes. But these insights sit in uneasy relationship with conventions of archaeological reporting in which objects are often reduced to lists in tables, augmented by a few illustrations from which to gauge their visual form. Parsed on the basis of their constituent materials (ceramic, glass, iron, copper alloy), presumed “function,” or both, reporting conventions typically reduce complex object itineraries to a singular dimension of the multiplex performative contexts in which they operated. Suspended as tabular entries in site reports, objects rest several analytical steps removed from their contextual associations and the depositional practices that configured their animate relations (cf. Loren 2010; Ogundiran 2014). As such, our reporting conventions elide what might be learned about their participation in forming personhood through techniques of the subject, including those configured by the “visual ecology of the everyday” (Wells 2012:72).
My focus here is on objects typically classed in archaeological reporting as “ornaments.” This term implies a particular use value as captured by the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition as “a thing used to make something look more attractive but usually having no practical purpose.” This definition builds on a view that adornment is representational rather than an ontologically significant practice that, through intimate bodily engagements, produced subjects (infants, children, emerging adults, women, men).2 The latter is a process captured, for example, in the Senufo term yawiige, defined as a “thing worn as protective medicine or [a] charm” (Glaze 1981:76; see also Schildkrout and Keim 1990:123–41). Taking a cue from Wells (2012), I explore the sensorial qualities of bangles, beads, and rings and, based on aspects of their form and analogical insight, consider how ornaments participated in techniques of the subject at a time when the western Volta River basin of present-day Ghana was being drawn into first Saharan and later Atlantic trade networks of recent centuries. I discuss how ornaments may have marked local bodies with effect (Keane 2003; Loren 2010). Focusing on archaeological contexts from about the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries, I glean insight into the shifting topology of person-making techniques by following the itineraries, associations, and depositional contexts of beads, bangles, and rings. I argue that following their itineraries using cues from their depositional contexts of recovery can help us glean a wider set of human and nonhuman relations—particularly with dogs and pythons—produced through ornaments and their interactions. This study yields insight into the compositional practices that involved a movement of ornaments from bodies, to which they likely lent protective power, to their depositional contexts of recovery in which some participated as elements of shrine bundles. Through their itineraries and affordances and as relational elements within bundles, ornaments participated in a dynamic repertoire of practices of well-being and personhood.
Compositional Practice
Among the key technologies of personhood documented for regions of tropical and subtropical West Africa are practices of bodily modification, dress, and ornamentation. Some, like scarification and other bodily modification, leave little archaeological trace, aside from rare sculptural evidence (e.g., Ife terracottas and bronzes [Garlake 1990:112–13]). Other practices, like ornamentation, can be gleaned from the archaeological evidence of adornments including the bangles, rings, and beads described below. Bound up in the intimate sphere of “traditional” body work, these practices are nonetheless dynamic and enmeshed in broader political economic landscapes, as we are reminded by Goody and Goody’s (1996:83) suggestion that labrets were adopted by groups subject to slaving to discourage raiders from abducting their women by making them unattractive. So, too, did labrets later become a particular focus of mid-twentieth-century government officials who aimed to eradicate the practice of lip piercing in an effort to bring “civilized” behavior to Ghana’s northern regions (Goody and Goody 1996:85). As such, technologies of personhood are an arena through which we should anticipate scope for dynamic compositional practice as West Africans navigated the shifting topology of intercontinental connections.
Akin to what Gosden (2005:208) characterized as the “general excitation of the object world” associated with an expanding Roman horizon, the centuries of Saharan and Atlantic trade were characterized by flows of materials, objects, commodities, and associated technologies that provided resources for compositional practice and, through them, effects on people. As Wells has argued for Bronze and Iron Age Europe, these were centuries during which newly accessible materials and objects likely affected the “visual ecology of the everyday” (Wells 2012:72). Expanding Saharan networks provided growing access to imported copper alloys, which were widely valued as prestige metals in pre-colonial Africa. As detailed by Herbert (1984), copper and its alloys were distinct in their malleability, color, luminosity, texture, and sound by comparison to clay and iron (see also Howey, this volume). Valued for their redness, copper alloys were often used to fashion ornaments and objects that extended the visual ecology of West African peoples as these alloys became more readily accessed through Saharan exchange. So, too, did glass. Setting aside spectacular exceptions like the first millennium AD Kissi sites in northeastern Burkina Faso, where glass beads were abundant in mortuary contexts (Magnavita 2003), imported glass beads were generally rare prior to the intensification of European trade. As visually “eye-catching” objects (Wells 2012:18–19), imported glass beads expanded the colors, textures, and shapes of objects used to adorn bodies. Though at times perhaps secreted beneath clothing, the addition of glass beads to the repertoire of adornment in a context in which cloth was likely a rarity would have disrupted the “low-key normality” (Robb 2015:173) of beads fashioned from locally or regionally available materials, like the occasional fired clay, shell, or bone beads recovered from sites in the area.
Glass beads from sites earlier than the eighteenth century in the Banda sequence are monochromatic and small. The polychromatic beads of complex design that became available through eighteenth-century and later European trade further extended the value register (Stahl 2002). The latter were incorporated into the sacred bead assemblages of Banda’s “founding families” (Stahl 2001:55–56) and became central to rites of passage and to the performative distinction of chieftaincy (Caton 1997; Stahl 2002). Together with the elaboration and proliferation of textile design that accompanied Atlantic trade (e.g., Steiner 1985), the effects of new things acquired through first Sahara and later Atlantic exchange on the visual ecology and compositional practices of Volta basin peoples after about AD 1200 bear closer investigation (cf. Wells 2012:68–69).
Beads were historically and are today valued in Banda and Ghana more generally for their protective as well as ornamental capacity (Caton 1997). Worn on the wrists, ankles, and waist, strings of beads are considered efficacious in forming the bodies of children—particularly girls—as they grow and mature. They play a visually prominent role in certain life transitions, as, for example, the sacred heirloom beads worn during puberty and marriage rites or the sacred strands that require careful ceremonial treatment before being used in the annual yam festival or at the funeral of a chief. Others are worn more routinely and intimately. The rattling of women’s waist beads, secreted beneath their cloth, is considered an attractant and holds power of sexual arousal. Elder women stress the medicinal qualities of beads, particularly those used to protect children, the properties of which are enhanced by a solution of roots soaked in water in which the beads are rinsed. Specific beads are associated with particular maladies, and the power to invoke a bead’s curative potential is the province of specific knowledgeable women. As made clear by the elders who spoke with Caton (1997:41–43), contemporary assemblages of sacred beads must be treated appropriately before being exposed to view through the pouring of libations, the singing of songs accompanied by dance and rhythmic gong playing, and the offering of food. These actions relationally connect the living to an ancestral presence that is fundamentally bound up in personal and social well-being. Thus, beads in Banda and in Ghana more generally are not merely ornamental but are imbued with the power to heal, protect, and form bodies; enhance beauty and sexuality, and facilitate life transitions. They are part and parcel of traditional technologies of self that are nonetheless dynamic and compositional, as implicated in the recontextualization of imported beads into the area’s sacred bead assemblages (Stahl 2002).
Amulets known as suman among the Asante of present-day Ghana provide another example of compositional practice as documented by a remarkable collection of nineteenth-century documents found in the Danish archives and studied by Owusu-Ansah (1991). Suman are “man-made objects inhabited by special forces deemed efficacious in satisfying . . . [specific] needs” (Owusu-Ansah 1991:118). A particular form was in high demand among elites and non-elites alike in nineteenth-century Asante (Dupuis 1966 [1824], part 2:xi; Owusu-Ansah 1991:10). Produced by Muslims, these amulets were created by writing select passages from the Koran on paper, which was carefully folded into small packets, bound in cotton, and sewn into leather packets worn as a necklace or bracelet or sewn onto war smocks (Owusu-Ansah 1991:12, fig. 1:107). Sometimes their efficacy depended on imbibing water in which the object with the text had been washed (Owusu-Ansah 1991:108–10). The documents in the Danish archives include instructions for making amulets that were in demand during the nineteenth century, including charms for protection in battle, everyday protection, causing ill to an enemy, bringing wealth and peace, securing marriage and ensuring fecundity, and general purposes (Owusu-Ansah 1991:43). Made by skilled practitioners possessed of esoteric knowledge, these charms were accorded considerable power, as described by the British trade emissary T. Edward Bowdich who reported that the Asante “believ[e] firmly that they make them invulnerable and invincible in war, paralyse the hand of the enemy, shiver their weapons, divert the course of balls, render both sexes prolific, and avert all evils but sickness (which they can only assuage) and natural death” (Bowdich 1966:271). As an example of compositional practice and dynamic techniques of the subject, non-Muslim Asante and others throughout the forest and wooded savanna regions of present-day Ghana embraced these objects produced by Muslim practitioners, valuing them for their power of protection.
As I detail below, ornaments, as objects with the power to form bodies, also participated as components of shrines, illustrating Robb’s (2015:177) point that “things’ design features form affordances that extend beyond their original projects.” Shrines are well recognized in the literature on West Africa as a compositional technology open to improvisation and franchising that creates ritual networks when powerful shrines are acquired and transferred to new settings (Allman and Parker 2005; Dawson 2009; Insoll 2006; Parish 1999; Parker 2004). Diverse in their form and scalar power, shrines figure prominently in contemporary and historical West African ritual practice. They typically comprise bundles of materials and things that are focal points for performative, efficacious actions that include offerings of various forms (cooked foods, the blood of sacrificed animals, invocations and powerful words). Despite their diversity, African shrines are unified by the ability to affect relations between human and nonhuman persons. As loci of efficacious action, their configurations and the practices focused on them produce what Keane (2010:188) terms “markedness” and “absence” in relation to the “habitual and repetitive activities that surround them.” Refusing the “invidious dichotomy” (Keane 2010:190) that distinguishes the utilitarian and the symbolic, Keane encourages instead a focus on how archaeological patterns can help us discern what was singled out for “attentiveness and interest” (2010:191) vis-à-vis an unmarked flow of daily action. Shrines, as socially produced focal points for action, cannot be reduced to “representations” of nonhuman spirit agents (Keane 2010:192)—whether ancestors or gods—but rather as loci and what Keane (2010:194) terms “indexical entailments” through which those nonhuman agents can be enticed into efficacious action through appropriate performative action.
But not as traditions frozen in amber, for both gods and religious repertoires have histories (Allman and Parker 2005; Trapido 2013). These histories are shaped by what Barber (2007b:111), following Guyer (2004), terms the “productivity” of the Atlantic African interface, a feature that can be extended to earlier periods when woodland savanna-dwelling West Africans participated in Sudanic and Saharan networks that ultimately connected peoples of subtropical latitudes to the Mediterranean world, a time to which we now turn in west-central Ghana’s Banda area.
Bangles, Rings, and Beads in Contexts of Social Action
The Banda Research Project (BRP) has focused investigation on how daily life in a rural setting in west-central Ghana was configured in relation to broader social, political, and economic entanglements. These include involvement in the Niger River trade from the early second millennium AD, the Atlantic trade from the sixteenth century, and the imposition of British colonial rule in the late nineteenth century (Stahl 2001). Our excavations have centered on village sites characterized by low mounds, some formed through the collapse of earthen-walled structures, others built up through metal-working activities, and others created through refuse disposal. Here I focus on the modest quantities of bangles, rings, and beads, augmented by small numbers of cowrie shells and drilled teeth (table 9.1), we have recovered from three village sites that provide the foundation of a phase-based sequence for the area (Stahl 2007): Ngre Kataa (NK), type site for the Ngre phase, encompassing the thirteenth to about the second half of the fifteenth centuries; Kuulo Kataa (KK), type site for the Kuulo phase, which extends from the early fifteenth through mid-seventeenth centuries; and Makala Kataa (MK), type site for the Makala phase, which encompasses most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While these sites overlap somewhat in their occupations—some mound deposits at Ngre Kataa are contemporary with those at Kuulo Kataa, and both sites were occupied in Makala phase times—the sites provide a time-transgressive sequence that lends insight into continuities and changes in daily practice across centuries when Banda was connected first to north-facing Niger trade networks and later to emergent Atlantic trade networks. These shifting networks brought new affordances (materials, objects, foods, possibilities for social action), as well as new challenges (of slaving and political economic demands of expansionist polities, including colonizing powers; for details, see Stahl 2001:82–106, 2015c).
The objects summarized in table 9.1 are recognizable as “ornaments” by archaeologists and Banda community members alike. We can readily imagine their intimate association with bodies and their connection to well-being, as suggested by historical and ethnographic insights on beads and amulets summarized above. So, too, were iron bangles (figures 9.1 and 9.2) and rings (figure 9.3) recognized as objects that confer protection and power (Hahn 1996:111–12; Kröger 2001:468–78; Rattray 1927:fig. 7, no. 6 and caption), as local members of our archaeological team often observed when we encountered these objects during the course of excavation. Iron bangles, reportedly worn on the upper arm, protected warriors from harm during battle. Iron rings are associated with individuals who possess the knowledge and skills to mediate with spirits—so-called fetish priests. While some of these objects may have entered depositional contexts unintentionally (a valued bead lost when its ligature broke) or through discard (a broken bangle tossed away), a subset was recovered from object clusters that can, with some confidence, be interpreted as shrines, as I describe below. Their varied depositional histories push us to consider the objects’ itineraries and the varying contexts in which “ornaments” operated. But first I offer some observations on their visual ecology, particularly as they relate to Keane’s concepts of bundling and marking discussed above.
Figure 9.1. Iron bangles from Ngre Kataa. a, b, c: semi-spiral overlapping coil; d: spiral-twisted closed form; e: spiral-twisted overlapping closed form; f: closed looped form. a, b, d–f are from Ngre Kataa, Mound 6 shrine cluster; c is from Ngre Kataa Mound 7. Scale in centimeters. Photo by the author.
Figure 9.2. Iron bangles and a gunflint from the Kuulo Kataa Mound 131 shrine. a: semicircular open bangle; b: bent semicircular open bangle with coiled end; c: gunflint; d: semicircular open bangle with coiled ends. All three bangles fashioned from spiral-twisted iron. Scale in centimeters. Photo by the author.
Figure 9.3. Iron and copper alloy rings from Ngre and Kuulo Kataas. a–e: iron, overlapping coil; f: copper alloy overlapping coil; g: copper alloy closed form; h: iron closed form with loop; i: iron overlapping coil form, spiral-twisted metal with a loop; j: copper alloy, twisted wire; k: double iron ring, overlapping coil form. a–b: Kuulo Kataa Mound 131; c: Makala Kataa Mound 6; d: Kuulo Kataa Mound 138; e–g: Kuulo Kataa Mound 118; h: Kuulo Kataa Mound 129; i–k: Ngre Kataa Mound 6. Scale in centimeters. Photo by the author.
Table 9.1. Summary of ornaments (rings, bangles, and beads) by raw material and by site. NK = Ngre Kataa; KK = Kuulo Kataa; EM = Early Makala; LM = Late Makala; Cu = copper alloy; Fe = iron.
| Object | NK | KK | EM | LM | Total | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rings | Cu earring | 5 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 9 |
| Cu finger ring | 10 | 10 | 2 | 0 | 22 | |
| Fe finger ring | 9 | 22 | 0 | 0 | 31 | |
| Total | 24 | 35 | 3 | 0 | 62 | |
| Bangles | Cu | 0 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
| Fe | 28 (16)a | 13(3)a | 2 (1)a | 0 | 43 | |
| Ivory | 5 | 47 | 0 | 0 | 52 | |
| Total | 33 | 62 | 2 | 0 | 97 | |
| Beads | Glass | 15 | 15 | 40 | 56 | 126 |
| Stone unidentified | 1 | 0 | 1 | 4 | 6 | |
| Stone carnelian | 5 | 4 | 4 | 0 | 13 | |
| Stone quartz | 1 | 5 | 0 | 0 | 6 | |
| Fired clay | 5 | 17 | 6 | 1 | 29 | |
| Bone | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 2 | |
| Shell | 2 | 4 | 6 | 44 | 56 | |
| Cu | 4 | 0 | 7 | 0 | 11 | |
| Total | 34 | 46 | 64 | 105 | 249 | |
| Drilled Teeth | 1 | 12 | 0 | 0 | 13 | |
| Cowries | 10 | 10 | 9 | 22 | 51 | |
| Iron point | 15 | 11 | 6 | 3 | 35 | |
| Total excavated m3 | 143 | 168 | 132 | 90 | ||
a n including fragments (n that are complete)
Serpentine Mimesis in Bangles and Ring
Most of the bangles recovered from Banda sites are made from iron. As a valued material, iron was commonly re-forged rather than discarded. When discarded, it was subject to corrosive weathering, so that most archaeologically recovered iron occurs as friable amorphous fragments. We cannot, therefore, take the number of archaeologically recovered iron bangles and rings as a guide to how common they were in the past. More than half of the iron specimens listed in table 9.1 and detailed in table 9.2 were corroded fragments, some possibly originating from a single bangle. However, details of form and style can be gleaned for a subset of well-preserved bangles (n = 20). Some are, in their lines and form, suggestive of snakes and, as I will argue below based on faunal remains, a mimetic expression of pythons (e.g., Glaze 1975:29, fig. 14, 1978:65, fig. 6).
Table 9.2. Summary of bangles and rings by site context and raw material. Fe = iron; Cu = copper alloy. Shaded context is an identifiable shrine. Bolded mounds are those where python vertebrae were found.
| Banglesa | Ringsa | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fe | Cu | Finger Ring | Earring | “Gong ring” | |||||||
| Site | Mound | Whole | Frag. | Whole | Frag. | Subtotal | Fe | Cu | Cu | Fe | Subtotal |
| NK | 4 | 0 | 2 (1O) | 2 | |||||||
| KK | 138 | 0 | 1 (1O) | 1 | 2 | ||||||
| NK | 3 | 0 | 1 | 1 | |||||||
| NK | 6 | 14 (7O; 1S) | 8 | 22 | 7 (3O) | 3 | 2 | 12 | |||
| NK | 7 | 2 (1O) | 2 (1S) | 4 | 2 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 8 | ||
| NK | 8 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||||
| KK | 148 | 0 | 3 | 1 (1S) | 4 | ||||||
| KK | 101 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 2 (1O) | 3 | |||||
| KK | 118 | 1 (1O) | 1 | 1 | 3 | 4 (1O) | 3 (1O) | 2 | 9 | ||
| KK | 119 | 0 | 2 | 2 | |||||||
| KK | 129 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 6 (1O) | 1 | 7 | ||||
| KK | 130 | 3 | 3 | 1 | 2 | 3 | |||||
| KK | 102 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | ||||||
| KK | 131 | 2 (2S) | 1 (1S) | 3 | 4 (3O) | 1 | 5 | ||||
| KK | 125 | 0 | 1 | 1 | |||||||
| MK | 5 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 2 | ||||||
| MK | 6 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 1 (1O) | 1 | |||||
| Total | 20 (9O; 3S) | 23 (2S) | 1 | 1 | 45 | 31 (9O) | 22 (4O; 1S) | 9 | 3 | 65 | |
a total N (O: subset of N with overlapping ends; S: subset of N with spiral twist)
Nine complete iron bangles were semi-spiral in form (table 9.2: “O” for overlapping, count in parentheses; figure 9.1a–c, e). Formed from a flattened or rounded iron bar, their ends overlapped to varying degrees. The spiral effect expands their vertical dimension in a fashion reminiscent of a coiled snake. Three other complete bangles and two fragments were fashioned from spiral-twisted iron rods (figure 9.1b, e, 9.2a–c). Two (one whole, one fragmentary) were semicircular open bangle forms (Kröger 2001:468n2) whose ends culminated in a tight coil (figure 9.2b, d). Finger rings were similarly made. A subset of finger rings made from iron (n = 9) and copper alloy (n = 4) were, like the bangles, formed with overlapping ends (figure 9.3a–e, i), with one example in the form of a double ring (figure 9.3k). One copper alloy ring was fashioned from a thin spiral-twisted rod and another from two copper alloy wires, twisted together and formed into a closed ring (figure 9.3j). In another variant, two distinctive bangles were fashioned from a continuous rounded iron rod that was looped three times to form a topknot-like embellishment on the closed-form bangle (figure 9.1f). A ring evocative of this same form was made from a thin spiral-twisted iron rod, formed into a single top loop. The ring was closed with a twist of its overlapping ends (figure 9.3i; see also 9.3h).
In their lines, all of these forms are arguably serpentine. Their coiled and spiraled morphology evokes movement (Wells 2012:28–29), none more so than the ring made from a thin rounded copper alloy rod worked into a series of eight undulating back-to-back S-shaped loops, the ring closed with a thin sheet of metal (figure 9.4a). A final serpentine object—one that less obviously falls into the category of “ornament”—appears to be a modified version of a long-shafted triangular-headed projectile point that we occasionally recover from Banda sites. The projectile’s shaft was deliberately looped into a series of back-to-back S-curves that culminated in a “tail” extending perpendicularly from the body, its head rising above its undulating body (figure 9.4b). In both its anomalous form that bundled (sensu Keane 2003) characteristics of a projectile point with serpentine qualities and its depositional association with a distinctive lost wax-cast twinned figurine (see Stahl 2013:62), it likely operated in Robb’s (2015:172) terms as a magical object. In relation to the bodies on which they were worn and the contexts into which they were deposited, these objects invoked qualities of snakes in relational practices of well-being and personhood, whether through use as bodily ornaments or as constituents of shrine clusters, as described below.
Figure 9.4. Serpentine objects from Kuulo Kataa. a: copper alloy serpentine ring; b: serpentine iron “point.” Scale in centimeters. Photo by the author.
As widely documented ethnographically, serpentine forms have associations of power for many African groups. Pythons in particular are understood as spiritually potent animals. Their remarkable qualities, including the ability to morph into humans (Glaze 1978:68), are linked to rain, gods, and the control of witchcraft. Images of pythons are often depicted on objects and buildings (Bognolo 2010:42–59, 64–67; Glaze 1975:29, 64, 1978:66–67; Werness 2006:335–36) or inscribed on landscapes (Norman and Kelly 2004). Bracelets mimetic of pythons are central to the work of Senufo diviners in Côte d’Ivoire, given the python’s role as a messenger and medium capable of connecting humans with the nonhuman spirits whose actions determine human well-being (Glaze 1975:66, 1978:66–67, 1981:76–78). So, too, do python bracelets possess curative power, facilitating what Glaze (1978:67) characterizes as a “life-sustaining communication channel with spirits.” In a richly insightful paper on “python work” around Lake Victoria in eastern Africa, Schoenbrun (2016) combines historical, linguistic, and archaeological sources to document the role pythons played as a material conceptual metaphor in a “constellating” process (Wenger 1998:126–27) that forged new political and economic relations among groups in a period of changing rain regimes and reconfigured agricultural systems. Their distinctive “bodies, life-course, and behavior separated pythons from other kinds of snakes and other kinds of predators,” making them good to think and act with (Schoenbrun 2016:218). Schoenbrun explores how, through conceptual metaphor and marking (Keane 2003, 2010) by mediums or public healers, python work was a means by which people navigated a spiritually dangerous terrain in a period of change. While not arguing a direct parallel with the role pythons played in these settings, I explore below intriguing evidence from Banda-area sites that depositional practice brought parts of python bodies into relation with ornaments of serpentine form. This evidence suggests that pythons—as well as dogs (Stahl 2008 and below)—were animals differentially bound up in techniques of the subject and practices of well-being over the centuries discussed here.
This chapter builds on an earlier study (Stahl 2008) in which I traced the biographies (here itineraries) of dogs, pythons, pots, and beads to explore the dynamics of ritualization (Bell 1992) in Atlantic-era Kuulo and Makala phase contexts. There, I adduced evidence that dogs were likely used as sacrificial animals in Kuulo phase contexts, their butchery and dispersal participating “in ritualized production of social relations” (Stahl 2008:180) and, more broadly, in the well-being and personhood that is my focus here. Dog sacrifice fell into abeyance (albeit unevenly) in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Makala phase contexts. That study also explored the contemporary and recent historical practice of secreting shrine bundles—often including glass beads—in pots, a practice also documented in Makala but not in earlier Kuulo phase contexts. The Makala phase was a time, too, when beads, particularly those acquired through international exchange, were recontextualized as components of ritual practice through their incorporation into the sacred bead assemblages described in Caton’s (1997) study (and above). These data suggested “a dynamism surrounding shrines and sacrificial practices that can only be discerned through close attention to depositional practice” (Stahl 2008:184), a point I pursue below with reference to the ornaments that are my focus here.
Our more recent work at Ngre Kataa allows me to extend insight into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries when Banda villagers’ broader networks were north-facing ones that connected them to the Niger River and the Saharan trade. Evidence from Ngre Kataa provides additional insight into the use of dogs in ritual practice (below), but I begin by outlining the evidence for pythons as ritually charged agents in the negotiation of human well-being and the dynamism of this practice over the centuries covered by this study. I probe the depositional contexts from which serpentine bangles and rings were recovered as a way to explore their potential role as “magical objects” (Robb 2015:172) whose efficacy likely emerged from their mimetic relations with the power of pythons. My aim is to explore how, by following these ornaments, we may discern practices of marking and bundling (Keane 2003, 2010) in relation to other ritually salient objects and depositional contexts that emerged through practices by which people negotiated their well-being.
Pythons in Ritualized Practice
Eleven mounds contexts across the three sites considered here yielded a total sixty-five constrictor (Boidae) vertebrae, many identifiable as Python sebae (African Rock Python).3 With one exception, they were recovered as single or sometimes several skeletal elements from “generalized” deposits that were neither obvious “midden” nor living surfaces. The exception was a cluster of thirty vertebrae—many burned—concentrated in upper levels of a late Kuulo phase mound (Mound 131; hereafter KK M131) at Kuulo Kataa (highlighted in gray in tables 9.2 and 9.3) that was occupied late in the sixteenth or early in the seventeenth century when the effects of emerging Atlantic networks were beginning to be felt. These vertebrae were part of a tightly clustered composition that included an iron hoe blade, three imported hexagonal blue glass beads, part of a large ceramic bowl, an imported gunflint, and several iron bangles and rings (table 9.3; figures 9.2a–d, 9.3a–b). As detailed in table 9.2, two bangles and one bangle fragment were fashioned from spiral-twisted iron, the complete examples culminating in coiled ends. Four objects resembling finger rings—though one was large and rectangular in form (figure 9.3b)—had overlapping ends, as described above. This context thus brought into direct association spiral-twisted and coil-form bangles and rings with constrictor vertebrae in what appears to be a shrine cluster that bundled locally produced iron and ceramic objects with imports (glass beads and a gunflint) acquired through Atlantic trade networks in what was arguably a python shrine.4
Deposited late in the Kuulo phase, this composition provides a basis for “following” python vertebrae (e.g., Stahl 2008, 2010, 2015a) to other contexts where they appear as single elements or several vertebrae spread across related excavation levels. Unlike the KK M131 context described above, these were not part of obvious (to an archaeological eye) bundles that we would call shrines. But what is their relationship, if any, to the iron bangles and rings argued above are visually mimetic of snakes? While not all bangles and rings were recovered from contexts that yielded constrictor vertebrae, many mound contexts yielded both, as indicated by those bolded in table 9.2. Moreover, a listing of ornaments and other “special” small finds (e.g., the gunflint mentioned above) hints at a pattern in which constrictor vertebrae are often loosely associated with specific kinds of ornaments, as indicated in table 9.3. Included are iron and copper alloy rings and bangles, ivory bangles, beads fashioned from various raw materials, cowries, as well as other more singular objects with ritualized connotations, as discussed below. In some cases these objects were distributed across a range of levels, for example, Mound 130 at Kuulo Kataa (KK M130). In other mounds (KK M118 and M148) they occurred within a narrow vertical range but not in the clustered fashion described above for KK M131.
Table 9.3. Contexts with python vertebrae and associated “ornaments”; numbers indicate counts. Shaded context is an identifiable shrine.
| Site | Mound | Unit | Levels | Python | Rings | Bangles | Beadsd | Cowries | Other (N) | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NISP | Fea | Cu | Feb | Cu | Ivoryc | Stone | Glass | Clay | Shell | |||||||
| NK | 3 | 42N 30W | 9 | 1 | ||||||||||||
| 40N 36W | 6 | 1 | ||||||||||||||
| 4 | Unit 1 | 3–7 | 8 | |||||||||||||
| 7 | 14N 24E | 2–4 | 1 | 1 | ||||||||||||
| 14N 28E | 3–5 | 1 | 1 | 1 | ||||||||||||
| 8 | 8N 127E | 1–4 | 2 | 1 | ||||||||||||
| 9–14 | 2 | 1 | 1 | |||||||||||||
| KK | 148 | 68E 50N | 1–6 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 (C) | [Cu ring: twisted] | ||||||||
| 68E 52N | 2–6 | 1 | 1 | |||||||||||||
| 70E 50N | 3–6 | 1 | 1 | 3 | Ceramic handle: twisted coils (1) | |||||||||||
| 70E 52N | 5 | 2 | ||||||||||||||
| 101 | 2W 2S | 2–7 | 1(1) | 1 | 1 | Jar w/ pedestal base in interior KK95–143; Brass ‘bell’ (1) | ||||||||||
| 9–14 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 4 | 1 | Ivory ‘hair pin’ (4); Polished greenstone (1) | ||||||||||
| 118 | 62W 4N | 3–5 | 1 | 1 | Brass twinned figurine (1); Serpentine projectile (1); Inverted pot KK95–451 | |||||||||||
| 66W 6N | 6–8 | 1 | 3(1) | 1(1) | 1 | Canid femur; Broken grinding stones, glassy slag | ||||||||||
| 68W 6N | 1 | 1(1) | ||||||||||||||
| 129 | 68E 4N | 2–8 | 2(1) | 1 | Copper ‘ear ring,’ level 8 (1) | |||||||||||
| 10–19 | 3 | 4(1) | 2 | 1 | 3 | 1 iron ring with additional loop | ||||||||||
| 130 | 93E 110N | 12 | 1 | 1 | Clay bead with cross-hatch | |||||||||||
| 95E 110N | 5–8 | 1 | 1 | |||||||||||||
| 10–15 | 1 | 1(1) | 2 | 1 | 1 | Drilled Canis mandible (1) | ||||||||||
| 95E 108N | 2–4 | Brass figurines (2); drilled Canis canine (1) | ||||||||||||||
| 9–16 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 1(C) | 1 | Drilled teeth: bovid incisor (1); Canis canine (1); carnivore (1) | ||||||||||
| 95E 106N | 6–13 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 1(Q) | Drilled teeth: bovid incisor (1); Canis canine (1) | ||||||||||
| 131 | 126E 140N | 1–2 | 30 | 4 (3) | 3 | 3 (blue) | Gunflint (1); Hoe blade (1); vessel KK00–176 | |||||||||
| MK | 5 | 4E 0S | 10 | 2 | ||||||||||||
| 4E 2S | 4–5 | 2 | 1 | |||||||||||||
| total | 65 | 19 | 8 | 10 | 1 | 21 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 1 | 5 | |||||
| total all sites | 65 | 31 | 43 | 52 | 2 | 52 | 21 | 70 | 28 | 12 | 29 | |||||
| Percent of total (excluding Late Makala) | 61 | 36 | 23 | 50 | 40 | 14 | 4 | 11 | 8 | 17 | ||||||
a total N (subset with overlapping ends)
b total N (subset of complete)
c minimum number; may be more fragments
d C = carnelian; Q = quartz
As indicated by totals at the bottom of table 9.3, none of these objects occurred in large numbers at the sites considered here. Patterns of co-occurrence are therefore more suggestive than definitive. Nonetheless, a simple measure like the percentage of each recovered in general association with constrictor vertebrae (table 9.3, bottom) hints at recurrent, though dynamic (see below) depositional practices that brought some ornaments into conjunction with skeletal elements of these spiritually powerful animals. Constrictor vertebrae occurred more often in general association with iron (65%) and copper alloy (36%) rings and ivory bangles (40%) than with iron bangles (18%). Glass and shell beads, though never numerous in contexts older than the nineteenth century (table 9.1), were seldom recovered in association with constrictor vertebrae (4% and 8%, respectively), the exception being the three glass beads included in the KK M131 shrine bundle described above. Though percentages are small, stone or clay beads more commonly occurred in general association with python skeletal elements than did beads of glass or shell. A unique fired clay bead recovered from the same level as a python vertebra in KK M130 (Unit 93E 110N) was banana-shaped, its outer curve decorated with fine cross-hatched incision, perhaps mimicking a snake’s reticulate patterning given the serpentine resonances of other objects described above. In another Kuulo phase mound (KK M148), a unique strap handle fragment, broken from a ceramic vessel, was fashioned from two clay coils twisted around one another (figure 9.5b) while another was untwisted (KK M130; figure 9.5a). Considered among the wider array of objects, these, too, have serpentine resonances. Also notable was the association of constrictor vertebrae with a group of drilled dog (Canis) canines and a drilled dog mandible in KK M130 (table 9.3 “other”), all in general association with two lost wax-cast copper alloy human-like figurines with a squatting posture, elbows back, hands on knees, that likely functioned as aids in divination (see discussion in Stahl 2013:56–58).
Figure 9.5. Ceramic handles from Kuulo Kataa and beads from Ngre Kataa Mound 6. Scale in centimeters. Photo by the author.
What might we glean from these patterns despite the admittedly small samples? First, some objects that operated on bodies as ornaments, particularly iron rings with overlapping ends but also copper rings and ivory bangles, were more likely to be deposited in general association with constrictor vertebrae than were others (e.g., iron bangles). Second, Kuulo phase contexts yielded higher frequencies and more co-occurrence among ornaments in depositional contexts than did earlier Ngre phase or later Makala phase contexts. This suggests a waxing and waning of ritualized practice that brought ornaments into conjunction with one another in depositional contexts and with skeletal elements of spiritually potent animals (pythons and dogs). But what is revealed if we follow the pathways of iron bangles for which python vertebrae were not an “attractant”? Where were they deposited, and are there indications that they, too, were incorporated into ritual practice? Pursuing iron bangles, including those of serpentine form, suggests that practices emergent in Ngre phase contexts intensified in the Kuulo phase contexts. Particularly revealing here is evidence from Ngre Kataa Mound 6 (NK M6), to which I now turn.
NK M6 formed through recurrent practices of metal working and ritual practice over decades and perhaps as long as two centuries (for details, see Stahl 2013, 2015b). Metallurgy is well recognized as a spiritually challenging craft that is often ritualized and personified in African contexts (Herbert 1993; McNaughton 1988; Schmidt 1997, 2009). NK M6 is no exception. As I have developed elsewhere (Stahl 2013, 2015b), several shrine clusters positioned within the mound formed part of a relational meshwork (sensu Ingold 2000) or scaffolding (Knappett 2011:106) that attracted protective forces and ensured efficacious outcomes in this dangerous craftwork. Though space precludes full description, suffice to say that iron bangles were a notable and unequivocally associated element of the mound’s shrine bundles. Fourteen whole and seven iron bangle fragments were recovered from NK M6 contexts, along with seven iron and three copper alloy rings (figure 9.1a–b, d–f; figure 9.3i–k). Though this was a metallurgical workshop at which iron and copper alloys were forged and fashioned into finished objects (see Haaland et al. 2002 on the trajectories and “stations” involved in metal working), these bangles and rings were not simply lost or deposited here; rather, they were deliberately incorporated into shrines, positioned so as to frame (Wells 2012:52–69) or mark ritualized object compositions.5
Upper levels of NK M6 yielded a particularly complex shrine composed of multiple object clusters covering several square meters (see Stahl 2015b for details). Each cluster included whole bangles of varying form, all seemingly deliberately positioned in relation to the partial ceramic vessels and other objects amid these compositions. One cluster centered on a large ceramic vessel, its perimeter marked by (minimally) four iron bangles positioned at intervals. All were either semi-coiled or spiral-twisted, as described above (Stahl 2013:figs. 8–9). In another cluster, a continuous circular iron bangle with no evidence for spiral twist—and therefore lacking in serpentine valences—was positioned below a vertically oriented pot lid, atop which was a dog cranium and below which were two carefully placed dog mandibles (right and left sides; Stahl 2013:figs. 10b, 10d). Placed amid the largest composition was another iron bangle—spiral-twisted and of semi-coil form and therefore serpentine—positioned adjacent to a set of miniature iron manacles similar to those ethnographically documented in neighboring areas to have been part of divination paraphernalia (Förster 1987:50, illus. 24; Glaze 1978:fig. 12; Stahl 2013).6 Close by were the two distinctive bangles with the tri-loop “topknot” (figure 9.1f) described above. Though iron and copper alloy rings were found elsewhere in NK M6—including the ring with a top loop that echoes the form of the tri-looped bangles—none appeared as a component of these shrine bundles.
A smaller ritualized bundle in lower NK M6 levels comprised a bangle associated with a single twinned lost wax-cast copper alloy figurine, similar to those described above from KK M130, alongside a water-rounded quartz pebble and two iron blade fragments. Twins are widely considered in West Africa to possess supernatural powers, and twinned figures were commonly mimetically invoked in divination processes, as, for example, among Senufo groups (Glaze 1975:65, 1981:72–74).
Notably, whether part of a shrine bundle or not, these serpentine ornaments were concentrated in upper levels of NK M6 and other mounds at Ngre Kataa, hinting that the ritualized practice into which body ornaments were incorporated was an emergent practice that did not characterize Ngre Kataa’s earliest occupation. The inclusion of bangles as a recurrent element of upper-level NK M6 shrine contexts suggests a connection between their power vis-à-vis bodies and their operations as part of shrine assemblages. Extrapolating from ethnographic contexts where iron bangles confer protection from bodily harm and mediate with the world of nonhuman beings (Glaze 1975:66, 1978:66; Hahn 1996:111–12), we might imagine that the bangles found at Ngre Kataa conferred similar protection and power as they circulated into shrine contexts. But while more than half of the complete iron bangles recovered from NK M6—which account for 70 percent of all the whole bangles recovered from the three sites under discussion (table 9.2)—were either semi-coiled or spiral-twisted, NK M6 deposits yielded no constrictor vertebrae. Isolated python bones occurred in three other mounds at Ngre Kataa (NK M3, M4, and M8), but only in NK M7 did a constrictor vertebra occur in conjunction with serpentine bangles (table 9.2). As a site of craftwork rather than routine domestic occupation, it is understandable that NK M6 yielded relatively modest quantities of faunal remains. Yet notable in this respect are the carefully positioned Canis remains included in the large shrine that capped NK M6 (above and described more fully in Stahl 2015b).
Turning to dogs, our recent excavations extend insight to earlier Ngre phase contexts where, as seen in table 9.4, dogs were present—at times, as described for NK M6 above, in ritualized contexts. However, dogs were not as prominent in the Ngre phase faunal assemblage as in later Kuulo phase contexts, barely registering in the percentage of faunal composition at Ngre Kataa. In later Makala phase contexts, ritualized use of dogs waned, though, as noted above (also Stahl 2008), available evidence suggests differential practice across the region in this period. Drilled Canis canines, presumably used as ornaments and deposited in association with constrictor vertebrae and iron rings and bangles at KK M130 (table 9.3), have been recovered only from Kuulo phase contexts. The emerging pattern is thus one in which we see dogs deployed in ritualized practice in Ngre (thirteenth to fifteenth century) phase contexts but not with the intensity seen in Kuulo (fifteenth to seventeenth century) phase contexts, after which the practice waned, albeit unevenly, in Makala (eighteenth to nineteenth century) Makala phase contexts—further underscoring the dynamic improvisation of ritual practice and negotiations of personhood in this period of shifting global entanglements. In sum, a pattern that emerges from available data is that pythons were deployed in mimetic but not bodily form in the context of the NK M6 metallurgical workshop, while the carefully placed dog skull and mandible hints that the practice of dog sacrifice documented more fully for the Kuulo phase was in place during these earlier centuries.
Table 9.4. Canid remains from Makala, Kuulo, and Ngre Kataas. NISP = number of identified specimens; MNI = minimum number of individuals; total NISP = all vertebrate fauna.
| Context | Canid NISP | MNI | Volume (m3) | NISP/m3 | MNI/m3 | Total NISP | % Canid |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Late Makala | 11 | 2 | 90 | 0.12 | 0.02 | 3,028 | 0.40 |
| Early Makala | 9 | 2 | 132 | 0.07 | 0.02 | 2,441 | 0.40 |
| Kuulo Kataa MP | 19 | 5 | 9 | 2.11 | 0.56 | 1,802 | 1.05 |
| Kuulo Kataa KP | 574 | 36 | 159 | 3.60 | 0.23 | 27,778 | 2.07 |
| Ngre Kataa | 72 | 6 | 143 | 0.50 | 0.04 | 7,070 | 0.01 |
Turning briefly to beads and their associations, python vertebrae appear to have “attracted” beads made of clay and stone, as outlined above. NK M6 also yielded a small number of glass beads, including three of diverse origins (based on preliminary assessment of their chemical composition)7 among the capping shrine. A blue-green tubular drawn glass bead fragment was made from a silica-based mineral soda lime (m-Na-Ca) glass generally associated with Mediterranean sources. Another blue-green opaque tubular wound bead was characterized as high PbSn (figure 9.5h). A third bead was a tubular European millefiori type, characterized by a beige core and black outer glass with complex swirled designs appearing in the lighter color (figure 9.5g). Two stone carnelian beads (figure 9.5c–d) were associated with the capping shrine as well, the source of which may be western India (Insoll et al. 2004). Two fired clay beads recovered from NK M6 but not associated with an identifiable shrine feature were fired to a red color and showed remnant red slip (figure 9.5e). Given that Banda pottery is seldom fired red, the bead’s red-fired color enhanced by red slip raises the intriguing possibility that a subset of the ceramic beads mimicked carnelian beads, some of which were of a similar tubular form. A fourth glass bead (figure 9.5f) from NK M6 was an opaque yellow barrel-shaped drawn glass bead similar in composition to mineral soda-alumina (m-Na-Al) glass known to have been produced in India (James Lankton, personal communication, August 18, 2011).
Though few in number, these finds indicate that glass and carnelian beads—bodily ornaments deriving from exchange networks that linked Banda villagers to broader Mediterranean and Indian Ocean worlds—were brought together with serpentine bangles (but not snake vertebrae) through compositional practice in this shrine assemblage. The result was arguably a new semiotic form (Keane 2008:S114) that bundled the power of pythons with qualities associated with these imported beads. At the same time, the beads stretched local visual ecology through their novel colors and forms. The specific semantics of that semiotic bundle remain elusive; however, the fact that it was repeated and elaborated upon in the later KK M131 shrine bundle (above) speaks to its saliency and resonance—its power as an association that was good to act with (Schoenbrun 2016)—in a period of transforming external relations. At the same time, available evidence suggests a diminished role for bangles and rings in later Makala phase contexts of the nineteenth century (tables 9.2 and 9.3) at a time when imported glass beads came to play increasingly prominent roles in local body techniques and practices of well-being (Stahl 2002).
Conclusion
The evidence summarized above supports both general and contextually specific insights regarding “techniques of the subject” and the production of well-being as a dimension of personhood. First and foremost, these techniques are dynamic. Archaeological sources lend insight into how people, through interactions with objects and animals, engaged in efficacious practice aimed at enhancing their well-being. The contours of how they did so through dynamic and creative engagement with nonhuman objects and beings can be gleaned by tracing the itineraries of “ornaments,” from their interactions with the bodies they helped form through the depositional contexts that brought them into meaningful associations with other objects and substances and nonhuman beings. These associations, along with those bundled in their visual form (Wells 2012) and design cues (Robb 2015:177), provide a “way in” to illuminate the techniques of subject that were ontologically productive of past peoples. In the contexts considered here, we see that serpents—and probably more specifically, pythons—were an agentic nonhuman “semiotic form” (Keane 2008:S114) that appears emergent in Ngre phase contexts and intensified in Kuulo phase contexts before waning during the Makala phase, underscoring Keane’s point (2008:S115) that “semiotic forms accumulate new features over time, contributed by different people, with different projects, in different contexts.” Objects mimetic of snakes first appear in Ngre phase contexts, though not in levels associated with the site’s earliest occupation. Both python vertebrae and serpentine ornaments occur at Ngre Kataa, but their depositional co-occurrence intensifies during the Kuulo phase, at the same time we see hints of mimesis in new objects and media (the serpentine projectile and the twisted-coil handle and incised bead fashioned from clay). Throughout these phases serpentine elements—whether the vertebrae of once powerful living creatures or through their mimetic counterparts—marked contexts and bodies and bundled qualities in ways that proved less compelling or efficacious for later Makala phase villagers as they negotiated changes associated with the expansion of the Asante empire into which Banda was forcibly incorporated in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.
Dogs, too, waxed and waned as participants in the praxis of well-being. They appear as elements of shrine bundles in metal-working contexts at Ngre Kataa, though they are less common in the faunal assemblage there compared to later Kuulo phase contexts where evidence for butchery and dispersal of their body parts suggests their more routine use as animal sacrifices (Stahl 2008)—a practice that diminishes, albeit unevenly, during Makala phase times.
As “ornaments” mimetic of pythons, I argue that bangles and rings were efficacious objects with dynamic ontological significance for Banda villagers. In early contexts, iron bangles and rings, likely of local manufacture and made from locally available raw materials, operated in relation to both bodies and shrine bundles. Copper alloys imported through northern trade networks reshaped the local visual ecology and were used to fashion both familiar (rings) and novel (earrings) ornaments in Ngre phase contexts. Beads fashioned from locally available materials were augmented from Ngre phase times with small numbers of glass beads, diverse in origin. Some locally produced fired-clay beads mimicked in color and form the carnelian beads now circulating through Saharan networks (figure 9.5e). Through time, imported glass beads circulated more widely and became an affordance increasingly central to technologies of the subject, playing the intimate and central role they came to play in rites of passage and demonstrations of power in the late twentieth century as documented by Caton (1997; see also Ogundiran 2002). While there is scope to more fully investigate how these diverse objects enchanted, disrupted, or set standards (Robb 2015), a contextual analysis underscores that they were actively involved in techniques of the subject, inclusive of practices of well-being, in diverse and dynamic ways.
By following the itineraries of bangles, beads, rings, and the bodies of spiritually salient nonhuman beings, we can begin to discern how things can “become sources of new intuitions, habits, and concepts” (Keane 2008:S123), remaking context and providing new affordances for future action. Through these we can glean something of the relational processes through which Banda villagers dynamically negotiated well-being across centuries of changing interregional and intercontinental connections in genealogically connected ways, even if aspects of their semantic bundling and its operations remain opaque.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Eleanor Harrison-Buck and Julia Hendon for their invitation to contribute to this volume despite my inability to participate in the session that launched it and for their patience as I’ve developed this chapter. Banda Research Project (BRP) excavations at the sites discussed here have been supported by the National Science Foundation (SBR-9410726, SBR-9911590, and BCS-0751350), the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (Grant 5133), and the National Geographic Society (Grant 4313–90). Research was conducted under license of the Ghana Museum and Monuments Board, and I gratefully acknowledge their support and that of the Ghana National Museum and colleagues at the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies at the University of Ghana. I am grateful to Peter Stahl, who undertook the faunal identifications referenced here, and to James Lankton for his elemental analysis of a subset of Banda beads. The greatest debt is owed to Banda people, including the past and current Paramount Chief and Traditional Council, for their continued support of BRP activities and the many men and women of Banda who have contributed to the project over the last three decades.
Notes
1. In previous work (Stahl 2008, 2010, 2015a) I have drawn on Kopytoff’s (1986) notion of object biography in exploring the history and circulations of objects in and out of the Banda area. A more recent literature challenges the biography metaphor for its life history implications of a birth, maturation, senescence, and ultimately “death,” as well as its inability to account for the transformations of things through time and space (Hahn and Weiss 2013:7). This has led some to adopt an “itinerary” metaphor, which is argued to better capture the capacity of things “to be present in different contexts, to appear differently in each of these moments and particular modes” (Hahn and Weiss 2013:9; see also Joyce and Gillespie 2015). I use the term itineraries here, though I still see value in the biographies metaphor for conjuring the sedimented histories of objects accrued through their circulations and contextual relations. So, too, do I acknowledge debates over the connotations of “objects,” “things,” and “materials” (e.g., Hicks 2010:81–94; Ingold 2007; Meyer and Houtman 2012). I use each of these terms, though with the implication that they reference dynamic rather than fixed entities.
2. I consider gendered aspects of crafting elsewhere (Stahl 2016). Here I do not take up questions of gendered practice, in part for limitations of space but equally because ethnographic sources suggest that the gendered uses of ornaments are complex and overlapping. When combined with the dynamism of practice that is apparent in the Banda sequence, this is a topic well beyond the scope of this chapter.
3. Our excavation strategies centered on mounds, some sampled through a single 1 meter × 2 meter test unit and others through contiguous 2 meter × 2 meter units. Excavation units are designated by the coordinates of their north and east corners in a grid system based on a 0N/0W zero point.
4. Space constraints preclude a detailed discussion of shrines and their varied forms in Africa. For a discussion, see Dawson (2009) and Insoll (2006). More information on the forms and associations of contemporary and historic shrines and their archaeological manifestation in Banda can be found in Stahl (2008, 2013, 2015b).
5. Of note is an image in Glaze (1978:69, fig. 17) showing a circular earthen-walled Senufo shrine house associated with healing. The building is encircled—marked—by a painted image of a python. These resonances between practices of well-being documented ethnographically among Senufo and other groups in contemporary Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, and Mali cited throughout this chapter and the archaeological contexts discussed here suggest that Banda villagers formerly participated in a broader constellation of practice (Roddick and Stahl 2016; Stahl 2013) for which we have frustratingly few comparative archaeological data sets. At the same time, we should exercise caution in imagining these as practices associated with a specific ethnic-linguistic group.
6. The miniature manacles and their context are described more fully elsewhere (Stahl 2013:61, fig. 11, 2015b:65, fig. 5.9). They remind us that conditions of well-being and personhood were not only produced relationally but could equally be challenged or denied through relational material processes (Stahl 2015c).
7. James Lankton conducted laser-ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) analysis of a sample of Banda beads. The characterizations reported here are based on his preliminary assessment of their chemical profiles as determined by LA-ICP-MS.
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