Inter-Action in Local Perspective: Material Practice at Diouboye, Senegal (ca. AD 500-1000).

The Falémé River has long provided an important north-south corridor of interaction and exchange across the eastern Senegambia—or so say oral and textual sources—and yet we know little of how local communities actually engaged with such interregional processes. In this paper, I begin to address this issue through a discussion of recent archaeological research at Diouboye—a village site on the Falémé dating to the late-1st millennium AD. I examine several lines of material evidence to consider some of the ways in which people reproduced social structures and identities, both within and beyond their community, through practices of production, storage, exchange, and consumption. Available data on the flow of material resources through the community suggest that people at Diouboye were indeed active participants, not simply passive reactants, in regional processes, but that such participation helped to maintain local social differences emerging from more quotidian interactions.