Djenné-Jeno: 1,000 Years of Terracotta Statuary in Mali by Bernard de Grunne (review)

The focus of Bernard de Grunne’s volume Djenné-Jeno (old Djenné) is on figurative sculptures and other objects found within the general boundaries of Mali’s great Inland Delta of the Niger, an inundation zone the size of the state of Maine. Over the past several decades, this area yielded an impressive array of archeological objects. Foremost among these are magnificent terracotta statues, for the most part anthropomorphic (animals like horses, rams, buffalos, lizards, and snakes are also depicted), produced over a period of a thousand years. Created by Soninke peoples between approximately ce 700 and 1700, they constitute a corpus of exceptional ancient art whose complex meanings and purposes may always remain somewhat enigmatic.

A historian of African art, de Grunne has intensely studied the archeological finds from this region for several decades and published important findings. Here his focus is primarily on ancient terracotta statuary, but he also examines wooden and bronze objects from central Mali. In presenting the subject of terracottas through both text and magnificent photographs, he provides readers with exhaustive coverage of these statues supported by thermoluminescence (TL) determined dates for most, and the results of meticulous analyses.

Early in his career, de Grunne came under the influence of Albert A. Maesen of the Royal Museum for Central Africa at Tervuren, Belgium, and George Kubler, an American art historian and expert on pre-Colombian art. He then studied under Robert Farris Thompson, and conducted his dissertation field work on terracotta objects in Mali in the mid-1980s. Thus, he brings to this volume very impressive educational and experiential credentials augmented by his intimate knowledge of an ever-expanding scholarly literature on the archeology of West Africa.

Terracotta figurative sculptures from Mali’s Inland Delta currently populate many Western museum and private collections. Despite their numbers, estimated by the author to be in excess of 1,000, little is known about their historical contextual meanings and use. While controlled archeological digs can inform to some degree about given excavated sculptures, such conclusions are often more general than precise. Additionally, these conclusions cannot always be convincingly applied to figures found elsewhere in the Inland Delta that may have been created during earlier or later periods.

Despite these realities, but thanks to the archeological excavations of Roderick and Susan McIntosh and other archeologists, as well as TL dating of some 385 statues, the author has been able to create a chronology for these works. He reasonably offers several caveats concerning this detailed chronology, but interestingly notes that several motifs such as snakes, pustules (papules), and certain facial features are consistently present from 700 to 1700.

In an effort to establish geographic style distributions, the author created a database of seventy terracotta statues “with verifiable archeological context” (pp. 20, 140, 372). Based on these findings, he then projected the geographic origins of a larger group of 393 statues. While doing this, he also relied on inferential stylistic evidence. This was clearly a herculean undertaking, but one which provides us with the first reliable data on the geographic distribution of various styles and motifs.

The chapter “Field Work in Mali” describes his attempts to attribute meaning to sculptural forms such as those depicting maternity and fertility, pustules, the power of the snake, and celestial vessels. While discussing pustules or excrescences found on a large number of statues, he concludes that they may represent either disease or ornament. In his Foreword, Thompson puts forth the opinion that they represent smallpox. This is likely for some statues, especially when the pustules are anatomically centrifugal in distribution or are depicted with central umbilication. However, I believe these pustules may also represent secondary yaws, a highly contagious disease, which was endemic during the centuries when the statues were fired. A third medical possibility...