Ancient site · Settlement
Ounjougou
A group of more than 100 sites along the Yamé valley on the Bandiagara Plateau in Mali's Dogon Country. Its layers record tens of thousands of years of changing climate and human life.
In deposits dated to at least 9400 BCE, archaeologists found broken pots, the oldest pottery known in Africa. It suggests that people in the then-greener Sahel invented pottery on their own, perhaps to cook wild grains, at roughly the same time as in East Asia and long before farming.
- Dates
- oldest pottery c. 9400 BCE
- Still standing
- No, or only traces
- Location
- 14.63° N, 3.23° W
How we know
No writing existed; the pottery is dated by radiocarbon and luminescence on the river layers it was found in.
Nearby sites
- Djenné-Djenno c. 250 BCE – 1400 CE
- Dhar Tichitt c. 2000–300 BCE
- Taruga c. 600–200 BCE (iron smelting c. 4th–3rd century BCE)
- Nok c. 1500 BCE – 1 CE; terracottas from c. 900 BCE
- Gobero c. 7700–6200 and 5200–2500 BCE
- Shum Laka used from c. 30,000 years ago to c. 400 years ago; burials c. 6000 and 1000 BCE