Emergent complexity and political economy of the Houlouf polity in North Central Africa (1900 BCE-1800 CE)

Long-term socio-cultural change is a non-linear process involving demography, economy, culture, social organizations, symbols and ideas. It is generally marked by succession of social formations with different organizational requirements and “worldviews”. The concept of emergent complexity used in this paper thus refers to the punctuated shift that led to the formation of social ranking and socio-political centralization. Five successive social formations of varying duration have been reconstructed in the ca. 4000 years long development of the Houlouf polity located the Cameroonian portion of the Chadian plain:  1) – small scattered pastoral-nomadic groups; 2) – autonomous mixed-farming communities; 3) – competing and rival peer-polities; 4) – ranked and centralized polity – Chiefdom in local political terms -; and finally, 5) – paramount chiefdom – Sultanate in local political lexicon-. This paper, anchored on high resolution paleoclimatological data and changes in regional settlement location and distribution, outlines the main steps of that evolutionary process. The dimensions investigated include settlement dynamics, political economy, the production and use of material culture, as well as their connected patterns of exchange from 1900 BCE to 1800 CE. A short review of research on trade in West African archaeology shows that the study of long-distance exchange tends to focus on characterization and provenience analyses of in-coming raw materials and goods. Important as it is such an approach does not provide access to the internal dynamics of the receiving societies. This paper examines the concomitant changes in site-location, flows, distribution, and consumption of long-distance traded items, patterns of craft specialization and production intensification, showing that they were part of interlocked feed-back loops. Evidence of intensification of local production geared to export is systematically documented in their chrono-cultural contexts for the first time. These deviating/amplifying feed-back loops triggered a dynamic that resulted in the emergence of five successive social formations in the Houlouf region ca. 4000 years evolutionary sequence.