[ 2016-08-16 ]

Grains, beads and bangles unearthed from dig sites in Banda. Credit: Ann Stahl/Northwestern Univ

Archaeological mystery in Ghana: Why didn't past droughts spell famine?
In the Banda district of west-central Ghana, July
is the hungry season. This year's sorghum, yams
and millet are still young and green in the
rain-fed fields, and for most farmers, last year's
harvest is long gone.

People survive on cassava. They grind the roots
and cook a polenta-like porridge called tuo zaafe
and they stir the leaves into a soup. But there
isn't enough to go around always, and the meal
lacks protein. It's hard to know whether autumn
will bring more food: Rains in Banda have been
erratic lately and harvests sparse. The region has
been in the midst of a 40-year drought.

It's easy to think that life has always been this
way in Banda — a poor, mostly agricultural
district, a 10-hour drive from Ghana's thriving
capital, Accra. But according to Northwestern
University archaeologist Amanda Logan, that could
not be further from the truth.

Logan says the hungry-season gap likely didn't
exist in the past. In fact, her research shows
that before the mid-19th century, people here
usually had enough to eat — even when rains
failed.

In a paper published Wednesday in American
Anthropologist, Logan reports that food security
in Banda peaked about 500 years ago, smack in the
middle of an epic drought. By contrast, a much
milder dry spell is currently wreaking havoc on
local diets.

Logan has spent the past eight years examining
archaeological artifacts — dug up by her and
archaeologists before her — spanning a
1,000-year timeline, searching for indirect clues
to food shortage and abundance.

She began by looking at charred grains —
typically left over from cooking, and occasionally
from kitchen fires. These grains provide a window
into past eating habits of residents.

Using more than 300 samples from 10 sites
representing different time periods, Logan
identified the grains and tracked changes in their
relative quantities.

She wanted to know when people were eating foods
that they loved, and when they switched to
less-preferred ones, a key sign of food
insecurity. (It's like switching from steak and
potatoes to mac and cheese when you're broke.)

From the 11th through 15th centuries, she found,
people mostly ate pearl millet, a grain
historically loved by communities all over West
Africa. Other artifacts, such as beads from
Afghanistan and locally made iron bangles, show
that during this period, merchants were plugged
into trade networks, and local artisans were busy.
That suggests there was enough food to feed a
significant number of people who weren't farming.
In other words, the people of Banda were
thriving.

Then, in the middle of the 15th century, a
two-century-long drought set in — sedimentary
records from nearby Lake Bosumtwi tell the story.

"That drought, in terms of its severity and
length, is like nothing we've seen in modern
Africa," Logan says. "It's really intense."

But here's the mystery: The archaeological record
during this period shows no signs of food stress
— no big increase in wild plant remains, which
people often eat to get through famines; no shift
to less-preferable foods; no major declines in
population. People kept eating millet. And a wide
range of iron, copper, ceramic, ivory and cloth
artifacts show that trade and craft production
were still thriving.

It wasn't until the mid- to late 1800s, long
after the drought ended, that Logan began to turn
up evidence of food stress. Present-day residents
of Banda still talk about ancestors around that
time eating wild plants to survive, and the
archaeological record backs them up: Four new
types of wild plant seeds appear in dwellings from
that period. A little later on, people went from
eating millet to maize, a historically
less-favored staple. They also began to eat
cassava, also not a favorite among locals
historically. Today, the hungry season has become
a fact of life in Banda.

So what happened between the 15th and 21st
centuries to explain these changes?
According to Logan, two key things: The slave
trade siphoned off many young farmers and
artisans, and Banda was incorporated into
Britain's Gold Coast colony in the late 1800s. The
British wanted to expand markets for their own
industrial goods like iron and cloth, so they
undercut local production of these items.

"Five hundred years ago, Banda was a producer as
well as a consumer of highly sought-after stuff
[like] gold, ivory, iron and copper," she says.
"As you get to the colonial period, Banda stops
being a producer of anything but agricultural and
locally consumed goods" like pottery.

These changes weakened Banda's economy, and
consequently, crippled residents' ability to
survive drought and other disasters. The region
remained reliant on agriculture even after Ghana
became independent in 1957.

Today, over 70 percent of residents work in
farming, fishing or forestry. Because they sell
much of their harvest to earn cash, families often
run short of food for themselves and have to buy
more at the market. If crops fail or prices rise
at the wrong time, they go hungry.

Back during the drought in the 1400s, Logan
thinks people may have used income from craft
production to buy food. Or that non-farm income
spared them from selling food they grew, leaving
them with enough to get through the year. They
also may have shared food among themselves, so
that the poor did not starve.

The geographer Michael Watts has shown that this
latter strategy was common in northern Nigeria
before that region became a British colony.

Scott MacEachern, a professor of anthropology at
Bowdoin College and president of the Society of
Africanist Archaeologists, says Logan has strong
evidence documenting the long-term decline in
Banda's food security. And her argument explaining
that decline is convincing.

"It fits really well with the historical record,"
says MacEachern, who was not involved in the
study. "We tend to think of colonization as a
fairly dry process, as essentially changes in
government. On the ground, they were fantastically
disruptive processes to the patterns of everyday
life. So it's entirely plausible that the decline
in food security she talks about is associated
with those processes."

Logan isn't the first to highlight the role of
colonialism on food security in parts of the
world. Geographers like Watts and economists like
Amartya Sen have linked colonial policy to hunger
for decades. But Logan is among the first to do so
using archaeological evidence, says MacEachern.

The new study is important because it extends the
story much further into the past, says Arizona
State University archaeologist Michelle Hegmon.

Logan's findings, Hegmon says, parallel what
economists and historians have already found —
that food insecurity isn't caused simply by
drought. "It's caused by economics and colonialism
and the way people have to produce for market and
things like that," she says.

Source - Winifred Bird

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