Daboya and the Kintampo culture of Ghana

Abstract

The main obJective of this thesis is to develop a typology of the Kintampo cultural assemblage based upon materials obtained from the Kintampo culture levels, and Kintampo-related surface finds of Daboya, Northern Ghana. The Kintampo culture is believed to represent the earliest farming village communities that inhabited the savanna woodland belt of Ghana. Ever since the culture was identified and defined, there has not been a detailed analysis of the associated artifacts and this has limited the reconstruction of the processes of change to and within the culture. The classification of Daboya Kintampo artifacts can serve as a framework for detailed comparative studies of the culture with other early agricultural village communities in West Africa. The thesis is divided into six chapters. The first is a revival of evidence for the earliest farming villages in West Africa including information on environmental change associated with them. Chapter 2 consists of a brief geography of Daboya, a description of my research at Daboya and summaries materials at of data on other the site. The pits that yielded Kintampo classification of Daboya Kintampo and Kintampo-related pottery is presented in chapter three while the rest of the archaeological finds are analysed in the fourth. Chapter 5 has two sections, the first being a synthesis of the information obtained on the Kintampo occupation. The second section is a comparison of the Daboya Kintampo information with data from other excavated Kintampo culture sites. In the final chapter, the relationships of the Kintampo culture in time and space are evaluated based upon the data from Daboya, other Kintampo culture sites, and West Africa at large.