Indigenous cosmology, art forms and past medicinal practices: towards an interpretation of ancient Koma Land sites in northern Ghana

Abstract

The ancient cultural tradition in the middle belt region of northern Ghana, with its stone circle and house mounds, contains varied material culture. The unique contextual arrangements of the material culture within the stone circle mounds and the diverse ceramic art forms, as well as their ethnographic analogues in West Africa, indicate the mounds’ association with past shrines that have multiple functions, including curative purposes. The archaeology of the mounds and ethnographic associations related to past indigenous medical practices is reviewed and discussed. This paper will also consider how some of the figurines through which the Koma tradition has achieved ‘fame’ possibly functioned as physical representations of disease, perhaps underpinned by intentions of transference from afflicted to image. The notions of protection and healing are also examined with reference to the resorted and disarticulated human remains sometimes recovered from the sites.

Archaeology of Spiritualities

“…The mound was radiocarbon dated to Cal ad 1010-1170 (970 ± 40 bp ) (YK10-3-N-10-L2, Beta-274104). This concurs with the four thermoluminescence and one other C14 dates obtained from elsewhere in Yikpabongo that range between the sixth and early fourteenth centuries ad (Kankpeyeng et al 2011 ) .…”

“…YK11-H13B) from the 2011 excavations. These, it has been suggested based on previous fi nds (Kankpeyeng et al 2011 ) , were perhaps referencing horns that provided healing and transformative powers to shrines through the addition of powerful substances in the cavities found on the top of these objects.…”

“…A key cluster of predominantly mound sites is located in and around the village of Yikpabongo. These were initially interpreted as burial mounds (Anquandah 1987 ) , but are possibly the remains of shrines (Kankpeyeng and Nkumbaan 2009 :201), perhaps functioning in the context of healing (Kankpeyeng et al 2011 ) . One of these mounds (YK10-3, subsequently coded YK11) was made the focus of excavation in January 2010 and January 2011 as part of a training excavation for students from the Universities of Ghana and latterly also from Manchester.…”

“…The term "power object" (Hersak 2010 :38) would seem as apt to apply to the Koma fi gurines as "medicinal", for the latter can be a problematic term to apply to African materials as "medicine" can have much wider meanings than in the West (Kankpeyeng et al 2011 ) where it is often "narrowly de fi ned as a speci fi c physical remedy to a physically manifested complaint" (Page 2009a :438). It can, as with the Hausa concept of magani , include much more in that it may "refer to anything which corrects or prevents an undesirable condition" (Lewis Wall 1988 :211), and emphasis is often placed on associated psychological, social, and supernatural factors (Twumasi 2005 ) .…”

Back to the Grindstone? The Archaeological Potential of Grinding-Stone Studies in Africa with Reference to Contemporary Grinding Practices in Marakwet, Northwest Kenya

“…1500-800 BP, are associated with human burials and may have been shrines (Insoll et al 2012;Kankpeyeng et al 2013). Koma Land mound site grinding-stones, initially considered as evidence of cereal grain reduction (Anquandah 1998), have also been taken to indicate the processing of medicinal substances in healing rituals (Kankpeyeng et al 2011). Kankpeyeng et al discuss how these grinding-stones may have been powerful objects that needed to be deposited at the mound sites as a matter of safety (2011).…”