The lost caravan of Ma’den Ijafen, Mauritania, with its cargo of cowries and brass, is widely discussed in African archaeology, providing significant insight into the nature of long-distance trade in the medieval period. While the brass bars recovered by Théodore Monod during his expedition to the site in 1962 have received considerable attention, the cowrie shells described in his comprehensive publication of the assemblage in 1969 have received much less coverage. This issue was addressed during a recent visit to the Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire (IFAN) in Dakar, Senegal in May 2017, when the authors re-examined the shells as part of a wider project which also involved archaeological and environmental surveys in the Maldives, the oft-assumed source of these shells. Examinations of natural history collections of cowries, ethnographic interviews in the Maldives, and environmental surveys in East Africa were also carried out. Drawing on insights from these surveys, we systematically compared the Ma’den Ijafen cowrie assemblage to three others from the Maldives, focussing on four criteria: species composition and diversity, shell size and evidence of modifications. This analysis enabled us to shed new light on the nature of the Ma’den Ijafen cowries and their wider significance to understanding the role of the shells in West African trade networks.
Despite the perceived importance of cowrie shells as indicators of long-distance connections in the West African past, their distribution and consumption patterns in archaeological contexts remain surprisingly underexplored, a gap that is only partly explicable by the sparse distribution of archaeological sites within the sub-continent. General writings on the timeline of importation of cowries into West Africa often fail to take into account the latest archaeological evidence and rely instead on accounts drawn from historical or ethnographic documents. This paper is based on a first-hand assessment of over 4500 shells from 78 sites across West Africa, examining chronology, shell species and processes of modification to assess what distribution patterns can tell us about the history of importation and usage of cowries. These first-hand analyses are paralleled by a consideration of published materials. We reexamine the default assumption that two distinct routes of entry existedone overland from North Africa before the fifteenth century, another coming into use from the time sea links were established with the East African coast and becoming predominant by the middle of the nineteenth century. We focus on the eastern part of West Africa, where the importance of imported cowries to local communities in relatively recent periods is well known and from where we have a good archaeological sample. The conclusion is that on suitably large assemblages shell size can be an indication of provenance and that, while the present archaeological picture seems largely to confirm historical sources, much of this may be due to the discrepancy in archaeological data available from the Sahara/Sahel zone compared to the more forested regions of the sub-continent. Future archaeological work will clarify this matter. RÉSUMÉ Malgré l'importance supposée des cauris comme indicateurs de connexions à longue distance dans le passé ouest-africain, la question de leur distribution et leur consommation dans les contextes archéologiques demeure étonnamment peu explorée, un écart qui est seulement partiellement explicable par la distribution clairsemée des sites archéologiques. Les écrits généralistes traitant de la chronologie de l'importation des cauris en Afrique de l'Ouest ARTICLE HISTORY
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