5 Bridging House to Neighborhood: The Social Dynamics of Space in Burkina Faso, West Africa

Abstract

Important aspects of the social, economic, and political lives of large villages, towns, and cities are spatially situated within neighborhoods. In ethnohistoric central West Africa, identities derived from multi-family social "houses" with large membership frequently intersected neighborhood identities. Drawing from archaeological and ethnohistoric examples, this chapter explores how transformations in the nature of houses over time enabled the development of neighborhoods and wards in the region. At the long-lived settlement of Kirikongo, Burkina Faso (ca. 100-1700 CE), changing house identities were fundamental to a major sociopolitical transformation from a hierarchically organized community to a more egalitarian one. The restructured and now larger settlement was integrated through the physical and social opening of houses to the greater community, including the establishment of crosscutting practices and institutions. The resulting community was rooted in equitable economic interdependence between houses and characterized by a presence of a stronger spatial identity at the settlement level. As these are also typical of ethnohistoric settlements with neighborhoods and wards, the Kirikongo case study provides an example of the potential pathways by which settlements may have successfully combined the strong identities of multi-family houses into larger, spatially oriented units. In some cases, these changes may have been critical elements for the development of urbanism.

Ancient Lowland Maya neighborhoods: Average Nearest Neighbor analysis and kernel density models, environments, and urban scale

“…Drennan and Peterson [179], documented shifts in the clustering of households among numerous culture groups through time. Likewise, the clustering of households to form neighborhoods has been noted by many others [190][191][192].…”

“…prove useful is the Early Dynastic period (2500-2334 BCE) of Mesopotamia where Truex [190] noted clusters of houses, West Africa including Kirikongo and Jenne-Jeno (250 BCE-1400 CE), where spatially discrete clusters mounds were documented [191], or ancient Andean communities, where potentially clustered compounds were reported dating to the Initial Period to Early Horizon (1700-150 BCE) at Cayla ´n [192].…”

“…Asia [211], West Africa near Jenne-Jeno and Kirikongo [191], or Postclassic Aztec communities outside of Tenochtitlan such as Cuexcomate [105]. Our approach will likely prove less fruitful in regions with densely settled, multi-room buildings, such as the Great Houses of the US SW, Indus Valley settlements like Harappa, or Roman cities like Ostia [212], where all households are, to some degree, interconnected, and in rural dispersed farmstead communities such as the Alto Magdalena in Colombia.…”

Understanding Archaeological Tells: Circulating Memories and Engaging with Ancestors through Material Attachments

“…The post-revolution period saw the maintenance of mound occupation but a change in spatial syntax to more open architectural forms and newly shared material culture produced by specialists not controlled by the founding house. This shift brought Kirikongo closer to the community-related practices documented in ethnohistoric settlements in the Voltaic region, where ancestors continue to be important anchors to social groups, but where social membership is more diverse and social relations cross-cut houses to create a collective identity (see discussions in Dueppen 2012a,b; 2019a,b on kinship in multi-family houses). It is this social flexibility materialized in changing ancestral rituals that may have enabled the community to bridge the Black Death pandemic of the fourteenth century.…”

Building from the Ground Up: The Archaeology of Residential Spaces and Communities in Southeast Asia

“…For many archaeologists, an archaeological village de facto represented a community (Birch 2013, p. 6;Canuto and Yaeger 2012, p. 698;Flannery 1976;Murdock 1949), and many studies have considered how community identities are formed or maintained in these contexts (Canuto and Yaeger 2000;Kolb and Snead 1997). In some cases, such as at the site of Kirikongo, Burkina Faso, neighborhoods of multiple houses may have been more meaningful to the social identity of the community than individual households (Dueppen 2019). This is demonstrated by shifts in house architecture, from more closed units to more open dwellings in which daily activities took place in the open, uniting groups of houses into wards.…”