1800 to 1200 BCE · Africanspan
A string of towns in Mauritania specialised, one product to a town
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The best studied centre of early West African production lies in the Tichit region of southern Mauritania, near the Malian border and five hundred kilometres west northwest of the inland delta of the Niger. Between 1800 and 1200 BCE a line of towns grew up there, one of them noticeably larger and near the middle of the cluster. Families of skilled craftsmen in each town made goods for sale, and the towns divided the work between them. One turned out arrowheads. Another made grindstones. A third produced beads of carnelian. Their trade reached hundreds of kilometres east and west, far past the neighbours. These were towns with differentiated craft economies and interregional commerce, operating at a moment when the Phoenicians were only beginning to establish themselves in the Mediterranean. The stone ruins are still standing in the Mauritanian desert. Whatever a textbook says about when African urban life began, the foundations are lying there in the sand to be measured.
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