Istwa Nou

The Aïr mountains sit at the southern edge of the Sahara in what is now Niger, twelve hundred kilometres east of the inland delta of the Niger. Between roughly 2500 and 1500 BCE the people living there worked out copper smelting, and once the industry was running Aïr became the supplier of copper across the central and western Sudan belt. Urban development in the massif itself may have come later. Something else came early. In five separate parts of Aïr, people began building megalithic burial sites. The archaeologist Augustin Holl proposes that these mark five small polities in the centuries between 1500 and 1000 BCE, each holding a share of the copper bearing ground. Monumental construction, political authority and control of a metal that everyone downstream needed, all present in the middle of the desert at a date when the standard narrative has nothing at all to say about the region. The routes running out from those mines became the arteries of West African trade.