1200 to 500 BCE · Africanspan
Sahel towns grow wards for weavers, tanners, potters and smiths
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Before the second millennium BCE was out, the trading regions of West Africa began to link up: Tichit, the inland delta of the Niger, and the Air massif. Across the Sahel of present-day Mali a new kind of town grew out of clusters of manufacturing villages. One ward held families weaving cotton cloth for sale, cotton weaving having been established in West Africa by the end of that millennium. Another held leather workers, another professional potters. When iron reached this far west during the first millennium BCE, each town added a ward of smiths. The fifth group were merchants, who carried the town's output to distant buyers and financed its carriage. Dia, on the western side of the inland Niger delta, dates from the close of the second millennium BCE. Houlouf on Lake Chad grew into a polity and a junction. Archaeologists have located several hundred probable town sites along nearly two thousand kilometres of the western and central Sudan belt.
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