{"it":{"id":"AFR-007","kind":"site","sub":"Africa outside Egypt","name":"Senegambian stone circles","place":"The Gambia; Senegal","lat":13.691,"lon":-15.523,"date":"Researchers are not certain when these monuments were built, but the generally accepted…","mat":"clay;earth;laterite","nfacts":9,"tags":["Africa","Megaliths"],"sum":"More than 1,000 stone circles crowd a band of land about 350 km long and 100 km wide in the Gambia and Senegal. A 1982 study recorded 1,145 sites. No other place on Earth has so many stone circles.","why":"The densest known field of stone circles, made with iron tools over more than 1,500 years.","src":[386],"nsrc":2,"yt":"Why here, and why so many?","rel":["STO-HEN","AFR-001"],"hook":"Senegambia has over 1,000 stone circles in a band 350 km long, cut with iron tools."},"S":{"386":["Wikipedia: Senegambian stone circles","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senegambian_stone_circles"]},"rec":{"id":"AFR-007","alias":[],"ms":[{"f":"Spread across a region","a":"area","v":"30000","u":"km2","o":"Spread across a region 30,000 km2, REF1 they are sometimes divided into the Wassu (Gambian) and Sine-Saloum (Senegalese) circles, but this is purely a national division.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Senegambian_stone_circles&oldid=1366156631","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1366156631 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0593"},{"f":"a 1982 study REF2 spread across an area","a":"length","v":"350","u":"km","o":"Containing over 1,000 stone circles and tumuli (1,145 sites are recorded by a 1982 study REF2 ) spread across an area 350 km long and 100 km wide, the Senegambian stone circles are the largest concentration of stone circles seen anywhere in the world, and they are an extensive sacred landscape that was used for more than 1,500 years.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Senegambian_stone_circles&oldid=1366156631","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1366156631 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0594"},{"f":"spread across an area 350 km long and","a":"width","v":"100","u":"km","o":"Containing over 1,000 stone circles and tumuli (1,145 sites are recorded by a 1982 study REF2 ) spread across an area 350 km long and 100 km wide, the Senegambian stone circles are the largest concentration of stone circles seen anywhere in the world, and they are an extensive sacred landscape that was used for more than 1,500 years.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Senegambian_stone_circles&oldid=1366156631","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1366156631 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0595"},{"f":"found in this area with a height of","a":"height","v":"2.59","u":"meters","o":"The tallest stone is found in this area, with a height of 2.59 meters.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Senegambian_stone_circles&oldid=1366156631","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1366156631 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0596"},{"f":"northwest of Sine-Saloum Senegal at the coordinates of","a":"angle (unspecified)","v":"15","u":"°","o":"Sine Ngayène is located just northwest of Sine-Saloum, Senegal, at the coordinates of 15° 32'W, 13° 41'N.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Senegambian_stone_circles&oldid=1366156631","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1366156631 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0597"},{"f":"Sine-Saloum Senegal at the coordinates of 15 32'W","a":"angle (unspecified)","v":"13","u":"°","o":"Sine Ngayène is located just northwest of Sine-Saloum, Senegal, at the coordinates of 15° 32'W, 13° 41'N.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Senegambian_stone_circles&oldid=1366156631","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1366156631 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0598"},{"f":"for the first cycle are located at approximately","a":"dimension (unspecified)","v":"1.6-2.0","u":"meters","o":"Materials for the first cycle are located at approximately 1.6–2.0 meters below the surface and are dated between 700 and 800 AD.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Senegambian_stone_circles&oldid=1366156631","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1366156631 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0599"},{"f":"for the second cycle are located at approximately","a":"dimension (unspecified)","v":"1.0-1.6","u":"meters","o":"The layers analyzed for the second cycle are located at approximately 1.0–1.6 meters below the surface and date between 800 and 900 AD.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Senegambian_stone_circles&oldid=1366156631","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1366156631 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0600"},{"f":"contains material located from the surface to approximately","a":"dimension (unspecified)","v":"0.5","u":"meters","o":"This cycle contains material located from the surface to approximately 0.5 meters below the surface and is dated from anywhere between 1235 and 1427 AD.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Senegambian_stone_circles&oldid=1366156631","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1366156631 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0601"}],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"sub":[],"site":{"age":"Researchers are not certain when these monuments were built, but the generally accepted range is between the 3rd century BCE and the 16th century CE.","dm":"[see dating_excerpt; method not extracted]","lab":"NO: inference only (style/context/king list/textual)","weak":"no direct lab result on the structure in our records; date from stylistic, contextual or textual inference","unesco":"","dens":"CENSUS"},"co":{"lat":"13.69111111","lon":"-15.5225","src":"Wikidata P625 only + curated wave0 value agrees","agree":"agree","b":"V","note":"wave8: site-cluster precision: OSM point is the village beside the Sine Ngayène circles, ~0.6 km (delta 0.0050 deg)","osm":"https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/ui/details.html?osmtype=N&osmid=2488907885"},"src":[{"id":"S0382","t":"no inline ref in article","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Senegambian_stone_circles&oldid=1366156631"},{"id":"S0603","t":"Wikipedia: Senegambian stone circles","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senegambian_stone_circles"},{"id":"VAFR-007-3","t":"UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Stone Circles of Senegambia","u":"https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1226/"},{"id":null,"t":"Augustin F. C. Holl, “Senegambian megaliths as world cultural heritage,” Arts & Humanities Open Access Journal 2(3), 2018.","u":"https://doi.org/10.15406/ahoaj.2018.02.00055"}],"sum":"On the plain near Sine Ngayene, in Senegal, the stones stand in rings like people gathered in conversation. Each is a pillar of rust-red rock, about as tall as a man, smoothed into a cylinder or a many-sided column and set upright in the earth. Stand among them and count. Fifty-two circles in this one place. More than eleven hundred carved stones. Walk a kilometre east and you reach the quarry they came from, where the places that around 150 of them were cut from can still be traced, beside the shallow basins and grooves where the builders sharpened their tools.\n\nThis is only one cemetery. Along the River Gambia, in a band of land about 100 kilometres wide and 350 kilometres long that crosses the modern border between the Gambia and Senegal, stand more than 1,000 stone circles and burial mounds. A study in 1982 recorded 1,145 sites. No other place on Earth holds so many stone circles. UNESCO calls it an \"extraordinary concentration.\" The archaeologist Augustin Holl, who excavated the largest group, puts the wider zone of megaliths at some 33,000 square kilometres, with the monuments clustered along the rivers like beads on a string.\n\nStart with the stone itself, because it explains a great deal. It is laterite, a hard, iron-rich crust that forms on tropical soils and lies almost everywhere in the region. The builders cut it with iron tools and shaped it into pillars so alike they could have come from a single workshop: on average about 2 metres tall, and weighing up to 7 tonnes each, as much as a large truck. About a third of each pillar's length was sunk into the ground, each in a pit of its own. A typical circle has eight to fourteen stones, by UNESCO's count, or eight to eighteen by Holl's, and measures four to six metres across. Most have one or more standing stones on their east side, toward the sunrise.\n\nThe details grow stranger the closer you look. Some pillars carry a cup-shaped hollow on top, or a carved \"button,\" a rounded knob, whose purpose has never been worked out. Others split into two arms in the shape of a Y or a lyre, sometimes with a crosspiece between them. These frontal stones were carved with care, and they were meant to be seen.\n\nUNESCO lists four of the densest groups as a single World Heritage Site, created in 2006; Holl notes it was the first listing to cross borders drawn in the colonial era. Sine Ngayene is the largest, with its 52 circles, including one double circle, and 1,102 carved stones. Local people call the double circle the King's Tomb. Wanar, about 50 kilometres to the north-west, has 21 circles and the region's greatest concentration of Y-shaped and lyre-shaped stones. Wassu, in the Gambia, has 11 circles and the tallest pillars, the longest rising 2.59 metres above the ground. Kerbatch, also in the Gambia, has 9 circles, including a double circle, and the only known bifid, or forked, stone in the area.\n\nEuropeans began to take notice in the late nineteenth century. In 1903 a Captain Duchemin dug two circles at Dialato in Senegal, and the strange arrangement of the bones led him to suggest secondary burial, in which bones are gathered after the flesh has gone and buried again. Between 1915 and 1930 a doctor named Jouenne excavated fifteen monuments at six sites. In 1964 and 1965 an Anglo-Gambian team led by Evans and Ozanne dug at Wassu, and its burials gave dates between AD 927 and 1305. In the early 2000s Holl and Hamady Bocoum excavated Sine Ngayene.\n\nThe mainstream reading treats the circles as cemeteries, and the excavations support it. Holl and Bocoum found that earthen mounds held single burials with rich grave goods, while the stone circles held collective secondary burials with fewer offerings, and that the single burials seem to be older. Iron spears buried with the dead had poor welds and bent tips. Holl reads them as objects made for the grave, not for battle. UNESCO sees in the whole landscape the work of a prosperous, highly organised and lasting society.\n\nThink about what that means in human terms. A society that buries its great dead alone, with treasure, and later begins to gather the bones of many into a shared ring of stone, is a society whose idea of itself has changed. Something moved from the individual to the group, from the chief to the lineage. Whatever drove that change, it held. The same careful work went on, generation after generation, with the same stone, the same tools and the same forms.\n\nFor how long? Here the figures diverge sharply. UNESCO's short description dates material from the mounds between the third century BC and the sixteenth century AD. Its longer statement places the finds in the first and second millennia AD. Wassu's burials gave AD 927 to 1305. An older view put all of Sine Ngayene in the tenth century AD on the strength of a single radiocarbon date. Holl's team found that it was used for about two and a half thousand years, from the end of the second millennium BC, and he dates the tradition as a whole from around 1300 BC to the fifteenth or sixteenth century AD. On any reading, it outlasted most empires.\n\nThere was once another explanation for all this. Jouenne saw the monuments as part of an ancient solar religion, a worship of the sun that ordered the farming year, and he linked the cup-marks and buttons on the pillars to it. No later excavation cited by Holl confirms that idea. But the purpose of those marks remains unknown, and the stones that face east are still there.\n\nAnd the deepest question has no answer at all. Holl states it plainly: nothing is known of the builders' cultural ancestry. Their bones are poorly preserved, and the practice of choosing only some bones for reburial makes them harder still to study. The tradition faded by the sixteenth century, without any link that anyone has found to a people living in the region today. Holl insists the Senegambian rings stand apart from every other megalith tradition in Africa and the rest of the world, so Stonehenge is a parallel, not a relative.\n\nSo a people who could shape and raise 1,102 pillars at a single cemetery, and keep doing it for well over a thousand years, left no name, no language, no descendants that anyone can point to. They worked iron, they faced their stones toward the rising sun, and they carved small hollows and knobs on top of them for reasons no one has recovered. Why here, along this one river, and why so many? And how does a tradition that outlived kingdoms simply walk out of history and close the door behind it?","qs":["What kept one tradition going that long?","Why build so many circles so close together?","What can a quarry tell us that a monument cannot?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/54/Wassu_Stone_Circle.jpg/1280px-Wassu_Stone_Circle.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wassu_Stone_Circle.jpg","title":"Wassu Stone Circle.jpg","lic":"CC BY 2.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0","by":"Niels Broekzitter https://www.flickr.com/people/nbroekzitter86/","cap":"Wassu Stone Circle"},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3f/Gambia_50_dalasi-2.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gambia_50_dalasi-2.jpg","title":"Gambia 50 dalasi-2.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/","by":"Jolle","cap":"50 dalasi"},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/Wassu_Stone_Cirles_shaunamullally_02.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wassu_Stone_Cirles_shaunamullally_02.jpg","title":"Wassu Stone Cirles shaunamullally 02.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 2.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0","by":"shaunamullally","cap":"Wassu Stone Cirles"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"1,000+","u":"circles","h":"Spread over 350 × 100 km, the largest grouping on Earth","s":[125]},{"v":"1,102","u":"stones","h":"At Sine Ngayène, with 52 circles","s":[125]},{"v":"29,000","u":"stones","h":"With 17,000 monuments across four main areas","s":[125]},{"v":"Clay","h":"Made of: Clay, earth, laterite","s":[125]}],"hs":{"125":["Wikipedia: Senegambian stone circles (and sources cited there)","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senegambian_stone_circles"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/AFR-007.webp","w":1280,"h":954,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/54/Wassu_Stone_Circle.jpg/1280px-Wassu_Stone_Circle.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}