Encyclopedia of African History

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Farming: Stone Age Farmers of the Savannah

Farming in much of sub-Saharan Africa is based on management of animal herds, together with cultivation of a range of indigenous savannah crops. These savannah crops include a wide range of small-seeded grasses (various millet species), sorghum, African rice, as well as pulses native to the savannah-forest margins (cowpea, hyacinth bean, Bambara groundnuts). These species, however, represent numerous distinct domestication events in different regions across the sub-Saharan savannah belt. The full process of the domestication of these species, from their wild exploitation by foragers to cultivation and morphological change, is incompletely documented.

Important precursors to savannah farming are to be found in the foraging societies of Sahara under wetter conditions, 7000-4000 BCE. Sites from the Western Desert of Egypt (such as the Nabta Playa cultural complex) and southwest Libya (the Early Acacus to Early Pastoral tradition) provide ample evidence for the exploitation of wild harvested grasses. With the exception of wild sorghum from sites in western Egypt, the grasses exploited at this time were not species subsequently domesticated, but their exploitation attests to a delayed-return foraging economy which probably included storage, an essential prerequisite for the development of cultivation. These societies began to manufacture pottery, much of which shared dotted-wavy line decoration, which suggests wide-ranging contacts amongst these mobile societies. It is also among these hunter-foragers of the Saharan grasslands that pastoralism became established. The spread of sheep and goats of Near Eastern origins occurred rapidly by the sixth millennium BCE, while cattle that spread during this period may have derived from indigenous domestication in the eastern Sahara as much as a millennium or two earlier. These societies would have been seasonally mobile, and focused on perennial oasis water sources in the dry season, where use of cached wild grains would also have been important. As climate change caused the desertification of the Sahara, such groups would have been increasing forced southwards or into Nile valley. Evidence from Nabta Playa in southern Egypt and from southwest Libya both indicate that the desert had been abandoned by ca. 3000 BCE.

It is during this period of aridification that food production was adopted in Sudanese Nile Valley. While the Early Khartoum tradition, which included dotted-wavy line ceramics, had subsisted by fishing, hunting and foraging, the Shaheinab Neolithic, which emerged in the region north of Khartoum from ca. 4000 BCE, added evidence for domestic herd animals. Evidence from ceramic plant impressions and common quernstones attest to the use of wild grains, including wild sorghum. These communities were seasonally mobile, exploiting the Nile during the dry season and ranging into adjacent savannahs during the wet season. Increasing reliance on pastoral production by these communities provided a basis for systems of wealth and hierarchy, which is evident in burials beginning in the later fourth millennium BCE. While some scholars have argued that it was among these communities that sorghum was first cultivated, the available evidence is inconclusive, and these archaeological traditions end around 3000 BCE without subsequent evidence for settlements with cultivation in this area. The earliest finds of domesticated sorghum are not until the first millennium BCE on sites well-established by sedentary farmers further north in Nubia. From the third millennium, the village to urban tradition of Kerma emerged, but it remains unclear whether this was based solely on the production of introduced wheat and barley cultivation in the Nile flood plain or also included summer cultivation of sorghum.

In West Africa, semi-sedentary communities of cultivators emerged in the early second millennium BCE among pastoralists who had retreated south from the drying Sahara. One such tradition emerged in the palaeolake and wadi systems of Southeast Mauretania in the Tichitt Tradition. Here ceramics begin ca. 2000 BCE and incorporate chaff-temper from the local processing of domesticated pearl millet from ca. 1700 BCE. Large communities are indicated by stone remains of town and village sites with large domestic compounds focused on water sources. While summer cultivation and storage probably focused on these settlements, pastoral mobility remained important, as indicated by surface scatters of campsites. In the Niger bend regions, the sites of Karkarichinkat South and Winde Koroji indicate established village farming traditions with pearl millet by the mid-second millennium BCE. Further south in northern Buriko Fao, the sites of Orusi and Ti-n-Akof indicate the establishment of millet cultivation and pastoral production on stabilized sand dunes of northern savannah. Genetic evidence suggests that southwest Mauretania and these Niger bend sites could relate to two distinct domestications of wild pearl millet populations. The currently available dates from these sites, however, provide only the minimum age for the end of domestication process, as equivalent or slightly older dates are available beyond the wild pearl millet range, including finds from India.

The Kintampo culture, known archaeologically from Ghana, indicates the adoption of savannah agro-pastoralism amongst forest margin hunter-gatherers. Evidence for domesticated pearl millet from ca. 1700 BCE, as well as domestic fauna, at Birimi in northern Ghana attests to the importance of millet cultivation among some groups, while Kintampo sites further south in Ghana lack millet but have yielded abundant evidence for oil palm exploitation form the forest edge environment as well as probable early cowpea.

Pastoralism, possibly accompanied by some crop cultivation, also spread eastwards and southwards from the Sudan from mid-late third millennium BCE. The Nderit ceramic tradition of the Lake Turkana region is associated with evidence for domesticated sheep and goats, while contemporary Eburran tradition hunter-gatherer sites further south have produced small quantities of ceramics and sheep/goat bones. The slow spread of domestic fauna in this region during the second millennium BCE is due in part to the presence of disease threats to domesticates, as well as established hunter-gatherer adaptations. In the mid first millennium BCE, Pastoral Neolithic societies were much more widespread and domesticates had begun to spread into southern Africa. On present evidence it is unclear the extent to which cultivated crops played a role in these eastern African food production economies. Similarly requiring further research is the establishment of food production in more coastal East Africa, where some sites with ceramics may also date back to as early as the mid-third millennium BCE. In the uplands of Ethiopia, evidence from Gobedra and Lake Besaka for domesticate cattle dates from the mid to late second millennium BCE, while early crop evidence remains elusive. In Southern Africa domestic livestock were adopted among khoesaan-speaking groups, perhaps in Namibia and the Zambezi river valley in the last centuries BCE, with subsequent dispersal southward. Later iron-using farmers made a more noticeable impact. Evidence for plant cultivation comes from the third century CE, when pearl millet is known from Silver Leaves in eastern South Africa.

The patchy evidence for early farmers in African savannahs contrasts with traditional models of the beginnings of farming developed from Near Eastern archaeology. While in the Near East sedentary hunter-gatherers took up cultivation, then animal domestication and then pottery, in Africa ceramics first occur among mobile foragers, and animal herding preceded plant cultivation and sedentary settlement.

Dorian Q. Fuller

Further Reading

D'Andrea, A. C. and J. Casey, "Pearl Millet and Kintampo Subsistence", African Archaeological Review, vol. 19, 147-173, 2002.

Barker, Grame, "Transitions to Farming and Pastoralism in North Africa" in Examining the farming/language dispersal hypothesis, edited by Peter Bellwood and Colin Renfrew, Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2003.

Blench, Roger M and Kevin C. MacDonald (editors) The Origins and Development of African Livestock: archaeology, genetics, linguistics and ethnography, London, UCL Press, 2000.

Clark, J. Desmond and Steven A. Brandt (editors) From Hunters to Farmers. The Causes and Consequences of Food Production in Africa, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1984.

Marshall, Fiona and Elisabeth Hildebrand, "Cattle before crops: the beginnings of food production in Africa", Journal of World Prehistory, vol 16, 99-143, 2002.