Seeking the origins of Takrur: insights from the Middle Senegal Valley Archaeology Project.

The combined results of studies on different classes of material excavated from over a dozen sites around Cubalel and surface-collected during
regional survey offer new insights on the development of first millennium societies in the region where the Takrur polity emerged by the 11th century.
Unexpected findings include the disappearance of copper for most of the first millennium CE, and the absence of sorghum, the most important crop in
the MSV floodplain ethnohistorically. The pottery comprises a diverse set of assemblages that presumably relate to the various populations – Wolof,
Serer, Peul, Tukolor, Berber – that inhabited the MSV and interacted at different periods, although sorting out the early substrates of specific historical
ethnicities is likely to remain elusive. This paper offers an overview of the data available for interpreting social, economic, and technical development
during the first millennium in the central Senegal Valley.