Historical Anthropological Study of Ancient Kingdoms in West Africa

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This fiscal year is the last year of our research project. We held the work shop in summer to arrange for the research plan and the final report.Prof. NAKAYA and I performed the field survey in Republic of Mali, West Africa with two Malian scholars, Tereba TOGOLA, Director of the Cultural Heritage of Ministry of Culture and Mamadou CISSE, Chief of the section of the Cultural Heritage. This archaeology excavation has been held in Gao, eastern Mali for about 72 days between November 2003 and January 2004.During this survey, we could find a huge building totally made with stones, the stone building being the first findings in the savanna zone of West Africa. Though we expanded excavation area to 20m × 28m, we could not yet find the full scale of this building. As for the period of its construction, we situate it between 7^<th> and 11^<th> century from the comparison with the earthenware found through our precedent excavation held at Gao-Saney in 2001.According to the medieval Arabic resources, Gao was one of the first Kingdoms in Sub-Saharan Africa. Its scale, materials, and epoch suggest that this building is the ruins of the oldest king's palace in West Africa that the archeological excavation can have found.Our research of this year is a very successful one, being that it can illuminate not only the obscure periods of the West African History, but the process of the social stratification that is an important subject of Social Anthropology.