2000 BCE to 300 CE · Africanspan

West Africa builds a merchant class before it builds kings

The towns came first. The states came later. That order matters.

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c. 2000 BCE to 145 CE · Indigenousspan

Macroblades at Fort Liberte mark two thousand years of coastal life

Courian Casimiroid sites sit on both the north and the south coast of what is now Haiti.

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c. 2000 BCE to 500 BCE · Indigenousspan

Coral files and conch tips fill the tool kit at Krum Bay

Red ochre and shell beads on St Thomas show an Archaic settlement doing more than surviving.

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c. 2000 BCE · Indigenousapproximate

Jolly Beach ate manatee and made flint blades no one else made

On Antigua's west coast one site breaks the pattern for early stone work and for diet.

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c. 2000 BCE to 100 CE · Indigenousspan

Anguilla's cliff top workshop turned queen conch into axes

Whitehead's Bluff stands on bare limestone in the wind, three hundred metres from the bay.

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Before 2000 BCE · Africanapproximate

The Niger inland delta was trading long before it had kings

Susan and Roderick McIntosh trace exchange among specialist communities past the second millennium.

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2000 BCE to 300 CE · Africanspan

Three ancient commercial revolutions solved one problem differently

West Africa built market towns, the Congo basin used rivers, the Mediterranean coined money.

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2000 BCE to 300 CE · Africanspan

In West Africa commerce came first and the empires came after

Wagadu rose in the first millennium CE on trade routes that were already centuries old.

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2000 BCE to the present · Africanspan

Benin's export trade in cloth was produced and controlled by women

Marriage across much of West Africa never made a woman her husband's economic dependent.

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2000 BCE onward · Africanspan

Women's authority in Africa did not depend on descent through mothers

Ehret finds the same female property rights in patrilineal Great Lakes societies and in West African markets.

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2000 BCE to 300 CE · Africanspan

Towns in West Africa were built by trade before any king built them

In the Sudan belt the towns and the merchant class arrived first and the kingdoms followed.

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2000 BCE to 300 CE · Africanspan

The world was already linked three thousand years before Columbus sailed

By the first millennium BCE the trade roads carried beliefs, techniques and people along with cargo.

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Before 2000 BCE · Africanapproximate

The Egyptian word for watermelon was borrowed from the south

Seeds in Egypt date to the mid second millennium BCE. The loanword is centuries older than the seeds.

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c. 2000 BCE · Africanapproximate

Omotic languages once reached far north of where they are spoken today

Loanwords buried in the Agaw vocabulary of northern Ethiopia record speakers who left before 2000 BCE.

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2000 to 1000 BCE · Africanspan

Trade stops being an arm of the palace and becomes a trade

The merchant shipping on his own account appears in the Levant and in West Africa in the same centuries.

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2000 to 1000 BCE · Africanspan

Commerce made its own towns, with no temple or palace at the centre

The urban form that trade produces goes unrecognised outside Africa and often inside the field too.

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2000 to 1000 BCE · Africanspan

The inland Niger delta grew commerce out of its own ecology

Fishermen on the bayous, rice growers among the channels, millet farmers on the dry land all around.

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2000 to 1000 BCE · Africanspan

In much of Africa marriage never made a wife her husband's dependent

One legal fact underwrites the whole history of West African women trading on their own account.

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2000 to 1000 BCE · Africanspan

The people who invented smelting lived nowhere near a capital

Iron came out of villages in central Africa and out of the country beyond the Hittite frontier.

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2000 to 500 BCE · Africanspan

Donkeys and river boats carried the West African trade revolution

Farming fed the towns, ceramics, weaving and metal supplied their goods, transport did the rest.

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2000 to 500 BCE · Africanspan

Tichit was trading a thousand years before the Phoenician cities

A merchant class appears in the Sahel while the eastern Mediterranean does the same separately.

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c. 1800 BCE · Africanapproximate

The oldest ironworking anywhere yet found sits in Central Africa

Two workshops with furnaces, tuyeres, slag and anvils, radiocarbon dated to 1800 BCE or before.

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Before 1800 BCE · Africanapproximate

Africans reached iron without passing through a copper age

The standard sequence puts the easy metals first. South of the Sahara iron came before copper.

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Before 1800 BCE · Africanapproximate

Iron may have first appeared as an accident in a potter's firing pit

Posnansky's proposal: pits dug in iron rich laterite, fired hot, leaving metal behind in the ash.

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1800 to 1200 BCE · Africanspan

A string of towns in Mauritania specialised, one product to a town

Arrowheads in one settlement, grindstones in another, carnelian beads in a third, trading at distance.

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c. 1500 BCE · Indigenousapproximate

A pottery style moves down the Orinoco and remakes who lives on the coast

Rouse traces the Cedrosan Saladoid, ancestors of the first Caribbean farmers, to this displacement.

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1500 to 700 BCE · Africanspan

The textbook story sends iron from Anatolia to Africa last

Anatolia to the Levant to India and Europe, then Carthage and Meroe, then the rest of a continent.

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1200 to 500 BCE · Africanspan

Sahel towns grow wards for weavers, tanners, potters and smiths

Dia on the inland Niger delta and Houlouf on Lake Chad anchor a two thousand kilometre belt.

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1100 BCE · Africanyear only

Phoenicians found Utica on the coast of Libya

Trading towns line the North African shore while the interior is written off as having no past.

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