‘This blessed city’: excavations at the second-millennium AD trade town of Jenné (Inland Niger Delta, Mali)

In 1999, the Direction National des Arts et de la Culture of Mali invited us to undertake excavations at the site of the planned new museum in Jenné. This paper presents details on the excavations and an overview of the results. Excavation revealed over 8 m of occupation deposits stratified above sterile floodplain. A series of AMS radiocarbon dates places the earliest occupation phase in the late thirteenth to fourteenth centuries AD, contemporary with the final occupation at Jenné-jeno, the ancestral site of Jenné. The building sequences in the unit document a lengthy and remarkable series of walls and occupation deposits. We identified five sequences of building–accumulation–levelling prior to the construction of the French <i>Dispensaire</i> on the site in the early 1900s. These sequences are described, along with an overview of finds from each phase. The results of the excavations provide information on settlement chronology and development, temporal and cultural relationships with Jenné-jeno, evidence for continuity and change in subsistence economy and material culture and trade and interaction.