Yikpabongo, Koma Land, Ghana
Koma terracottas
About the 6th to 12th centuries (mounds first called graves, then shrines)
In Koma Land, northern Ghana, mounds hold terracotta people and animals, pots, grinding stones, and human bone. The first digging called the mounds graves and, by thermoluminescence, put the figures between the 15th and the 17th centuries, later stretched toward 1200 to 1800. New radiocarbon dates put mound-building and a burial in the 6th to 12th centuries, and the arrangement reads as shrines, including shrines for healing. The people who live there now are not the makers.
Why this is extraordinary
The figures turned up in mounds in the north of Ghana, in the country of the Sisili and the Kulpawn. People and animals in clay, often with the features simplified until they are almost signs, lay with pots, grinding stones, and human bone. The first excavation, in 1985 at the village of Yikpabongo, called the mounds burials and set them beside the tomb fields of Senegambia and Mali. Thermoluminescence, the light a ceramic gives off when it is heated in the lab, a clock that starts at the last hard firing, put the figures in the 15th to 17th centuries. That span was later opened to about 1200 to 1800. The people who live in Koma Land now, and who gave the region its archaeological name, are a later settlement. They call the figures kronkronbali, the children of the old days. The reports do not make them the makers’ descendants.
A second campaign, from 2006, split the mounds. House mounds hold burials laid in a repeated way, head toward the southwest. Stone-circle mounds hold small stones, querns, figures, and a great weight of pottery, set down as if the set mattered. A burial 170 centimetres down in a Yikpabongo house mound is radiocarbon dated to calibrated AD 540 to 650. Eleven more burials came out of house mounds at Tando-Fagusa. The same later work’s thermoluminescence averages on Yikpabongo ceramics still scatter, about AD 979, 1012, 1287, and 1317, each plus or minus a few decades. So the tradition can run from the 6th century into the early second millennium, which is how the excavators now summarise it, and the first young ages are not simply a misprint. The catch is that a firing date and a burial date are dates on different things. They coincide only when that figure went into the ground with that body.
Computed tomography of eight figures from the excavations found a cavity that someone had made, running in from the surface. Nothing in the scan writes the word for what was put there. Horn-shaped cones, phalli, and piles of grinders are read as fertility and as plant medicines, because a healer’s kit in the region is discarded, whole, when the rite is over. That is a cosmological reading in the plain sense of a world of ancestors and illness. It is not a star. No mound is given an azimuth. The figure in the photograph is about 30 centimetres high, in Paris, and the museum’s century is the older one, the 13th to the 16th. It is a Koma body. It is not the skeleton of AD 540 to 650, and the cavity, if this one has one, is not on the outside.
What this changes: if the shrines are first-millennium, figurative clay and a healing deposit are part of the earliest village mounds in this part of Ghana, and the late ages are a last chapter or a clock that needs repeating. If every mound is a late grave, the radiocarbon burial has to be explained away. Food production on the forest edge, the Kintampo question, is an older and separate argument.
Why it matters
A grave full of portrait figures is a funeral custom. A shrine where a sick person is moved into a clay body is medicine. The same mound can hold a burial and still be a place of rite. The date decides whether this is a late medieval custom or a first-millennium one.
Koma Land covers a wide tract of the Sisili and Kulpawn basins; one account says about 9,000 square kilometres of archaeological country, another about 100 square kilometres for the figurine zone. The modern Koma, whose name the region bears, settled later. They call the figures kronkronbali, children of the old days, and they are not, in the excavation reports, the descendants of the makers. The first campaign, in 1985, at Yikpabongo, read the mounds as burials and compared them with Senegambian and Malian tomb fields. Thermoluminescence on the clay first gave the 15th to 17th centuries, then a longer span of about 1200 to 1800. From 2006 the mounds split in two. House mounds contain patterned burials. Stone-circle mounds contain stones, querns, figures, and masses of pottery, arranged as shrines with more than one possible job. A burial in a house mound at Yikpabongo, about 170 centimetres down, is radiocarbon dated to calibrated AD 540 to 650. Eleven further burials came from house mounds at Tando-Fagusa. Thermoluminescence on Yikpabongo ceramics in that later programme averages, in one table, about AD 979, 1012, 1287, and 1317, each with an uncertainty of a few decades. The practice is described as running from the 6th to the 12th centuries. Computed tomography of eight excavated figures found a made cavity running in from the surface. Why the hole was there is not known. Horns, phalli, and the grinders are read as medicines and as fertility. The “cosmology” in that report is ancestors, illness, and healing. It is not a star, and no mound has a published azimuth.
Photo tour
1 photograph, unedited. On a phone, swipe the row. Choose one to look closely.
- The Paris figure shows the outside of the tradition. It does not show a cavity, and it is not the skeleton dated to AD 540 to 650.
What is still unexplained
These sit beside the consensus account, with the same visual weight. None of them is marked solved.
Location and dating
- Location
- Yikpabongo, in Koma Land, where the borders of Ghana’s Upper West, Upper East, and Northern regions meet, drained by the Sisili and the Kulpawn. The pin is the village, 10.244 north, 1.568 west. The Paris figure is not at that pin.
- Period label
- Current consensus — open to revision Radiocarbon and the later thermoluminescence put the mounds from the 6th century into the early second millennium. The first thermoluminescence reading, 15th to 17th century and then about 1200 to 1800, is the older published clock. The modern Koma are a later settlement.
- How this dating was done
- Radiocarbon on bone and organic fill, and thermoluminescence on ceramics. The two do not return one century. The Paris museum label, 13th to 16th century, follows the older span.
- What could change it
- Thermoluminescence and radiocarbon on the same buried figure, from a recorded mound, would show whether the early young ages were a lab effect or a real late chapter.
What is actually there
- Mounds hold terracotta figures, pots, grinders, and human bone.
- The first reading was burial mounds of the 15th to 17th centuries.
- A Yikpabongo burial is calibrated to AD 540 to 650.
- Eight scanned figures from excavations have a deliberate internal cavity.
- The Paris figure is about 30 centimetres high and is not from that burial.
- No star or mound azimuth is published. The cosmology in the report is healing and ancestors.
Open questions
| Question | Status |
|---|---|
| Were the mounds graves or shrines? | Open. House mounds have patterned burials. Stone circles have shrine-like sets of figures and pots. |
| Why is there a cavity inside a figure? | Open. The holes are deliberate. Medicine, or something else put inside, is a reading, not a residue that was found in every cavity. |
The current narrative
Where publication stands today. It is the best-supported reading, and it is open to revision. It is not a verdict.
The current narrative — open to revision
First-millennium shrines, some of them for healing
From about the 6th to the 12th centuries, Koma Land mounds were places where figures, pots, and grinders were deposited in rites that included healing and fertility, alongside real burials in house mounds.
What supports this
- The stone-circle arrangements match shrine deposits more than a single funeral.
- Radiocarbon puts a Yikpabongo burial at calibrated AD 540 to 650, inside the first millennium.
- Cavities, horn-like cones, and clusters of querns fit the medicine reading offered for the figures.
What pushes back
- The first thermoluminescence ages are much younger, and even the later averages reach the 14th century.
- Patterned skeletons are burials. A shrine reading has to include them, not replace them.
- The cavities’ contents are not preserved, so “medicine” is a use inferred from the hole and from later practice.
What would settle it
It is the centre because the renewed excavations published both the early radiocarbon ages and the shrine-like layouts. It moves if the young thermoluminescence ages are confirmed on the same objects as the early burials.
Emerging narratives
Other published readings. Each may be right. None is adopted here unless the evidence carries it.
An emerging narrative
Later burial mounds
The figures are grave goods of a tradition centred in the second millennium, as the first thermoluminescence ages said.
What supports this
- The original thermoluminescence results, 15th to 17th centuries, then about 1200 to 1800, are real measurements.
- The Paris label still uses the 13th to 16th centuries.
- Burials are present, so a funeral reading was never invented from nothing.
What pushes back
- Calibrated AD 540 to 650 on a burial in a house mound is not a 15th-century grave.
- Stone-circle contents are arranged as deposits, not only as a body with possessions.
- A long span can include late figures without making the early burials late.
What would settle it
It stays because the first clock has not been formally withdrawn from every figure, and museum labels still wear it. It is not the centre for the excavated mounds whose radiocarbon is first millennium.
Should the current view be reevaluated?
Open to revision
The shift from “late graves” to “early shrines” is published, and so is the remaining scatter of thermoluminescence ages. Open keeps both clocks visible.
What drives this
- A burial at calibrated AD 540 to 650 beside thermoluminescence ages that run later.
- House-mound funerals and stone-circle deposits in the same landscape.
- Cavities inside figures, with no residue that names itself as medicine.
This is the museum’s own weighing of the evidence. It is not a visitor vote, and it is separate from the slider.
Weigh it yourself
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If the contested reading is right
What would follow if a reading that is not the consensus turned out to be true, and what could settle it. This explains the stakes. It does not adopt the reading.
Healing shrines in the first millennium, with burials beside them
Figurative terracotta and a shrine practice in northern Ghana would sit several centuries before the first published thermoluminescence ages, and the graves would be part of that practice rather than the whole of it.
Why it is still worth a test
One figure with both a thermoluminescence age and a radiocarbon age from the same recorded deposit.
Sources
- Indigenous cosmology and Koma Land sites African Archaeological Review, the shrine reading and the date table
- Computed tomography of Koma figurines African Arts, the cavities and the older thermoluminescence span
Image credits
- A Koma terracotta about 30 centimetres high, in the Musée du quai Branly, Paris. The museum label uses the 13th to 16th centuries. It is not a figure from the dated Yikpabongo burial. No cavity shows on the outside. . Siren-Com, CC BY-SA 3.0. Shown unedited.