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Julien Gauthier

The fragmentary sculpture attributed to the Djenné-Jeno cultural sphere, recovered in the region of Mopti and said to originate from the tumuli of the Niger Inner Delta, belongs to a corpus of West African terracotta productions whose archaeological and historical interpretation remains both rich and contested. Its present condition, described as a fragment in a recumbent or laying position, already signals the double instability that defines its scholarly reception: material incompleteness on the one hand. Please note that in absence of laboratory tests, the attribution is provided for reference only, based on our knowledge and experience in the field. Whereby we can only determine an exact age stylistically.

Djenné-Jeno, located in present-day Mali, is one of the most significant early urban centres of the West African Sahel, flourishing between roughly the third century BCE and the second millennium CE. The site, together with the broader Niger Inner Delta region, constitutes a complex archaeological landscape in which settlement mounds, burial tumuli, and dispersed habitation traces are interwoven. The reported provenance from the tumuli of the Inner Delta situates the sculpture within mortuary or commemorative contexts, although the absence of secure stratigraphic documentation complicates any definitive assignment of function.

The object’s collection in Mopti, a key riverine and commercial node in central Mali, reflects the well-documented patterns of artifact circulation that intensified during the colonial and postcolonial periods. Objects from the Djenné-Djenno cultural horizon have frequently been detached from their archaeological matrices through both controlled excavation and informal recovery, entering museum and private collections with partial or reconstructed provenance narratives. This fragmentation of context is not merely accidental but constitutive of the modern biography of such objects.

Formally, Djenné-Jeno terracottas are often characterised by schematic yet expressive modeling of the human figure, with particular attention to posture, bodily attenuation, and the abstraction of facial features. In fragmentary state, however, such sculptures resist full iconographic reading. The recumbent position of the present piece may be original or may result from post-depositional breakage; consequently, interpretation oscillates between intentional representation—perhaps of repose, ritual deposition, or funerary placement—and accidental reorientation through taphonomic processes.

Within the broader cultural horizon of the Niger Inner Delta, often referred to as the Niger Inner Delta, terracotta production is frequently associated with ritualised practices connected to ancestry, cosmology, and social memory. Yet scholarly caution is required, as ethnographic analogies cannot be straightforwardly projected onto archaeological material spanning many centuries. The fragment thus occupies an interpretive threshold: simultaneously an aesthetic object, an archaeological trace, and a displaced artifact whose meaning has been reconfigured through collection and circulation.

Its fragmentary state, rather than diminishing its significance, underscores the epistemological conditions under which West African archaeological sculpture is studied. What remains is not only a material remnant of a once-integrated object, but also a testimony to the layered histories of excavation, trade, and musealisation that continue to shape the understanding of Djenné-Jeno material culture.

Reference list

Bedaux, R. M. A. and Lange, D. (eds.), 1994. The Djenné-Jeno Archaeological Project: Report of the 1981–1982 Field Season. Leiden: Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde.

McIntosh, R. J., 1995. Ancient Middle Niger: Urbanism and the Self-Organizing Landscape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

McIntosh, S. K. (ed.), 1998. Beyond Chiefdoms: Pathways to Complexity in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Insoll, T., 2003. The Archaeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gallay, A., 2011. L’archéologie du Mali: des origines à l’islam. Paris: Errance.

CAB44317

Terracotta - Discrete condizioni

Una scultura in terracotta - Djenne - Mali  (Senza prezzo di riserva)

Arte tribale e africana

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