The Bura Asinda civilization
Geography
The splendid Bura terra cotta pieces originate from what is now Burkina Faso, the name Bura coming from the burial ground where the first archaeological pieces were found. Asinda and Sikka are two more precise locations, inside this larger excavation area.
Burkina, or Burkina Faso in its long form, was formerly called the Upper Volta. It is a landlocked country in West Africa whose name in French means "country of the just men". The country is inhabited by the Burkinabé, a word which designates the inhabitant, male or female, in the Foulfouldé language spoken by the Peuls, a population of nomadic stock breeders throughout West Africa.
Burkina Faso shares a border with six countries: Mali in north, Niger in the east, the Benin in south-east, Togo and Ghana in the south and the Ivory Coast in south-west. A former French colony, Upper Volta obtained independence in 1960.
Burkina Faso has two types of landscapes. A large part of the country is covered by a vast plain. It is a very slightly undulating with a few isolated hills, the vestiges of a Precambrian land mass. The south-western part of the country is a more sandy. It is here that the country reaches its highest point at Mt. Tenakourou (749 m). The land is delimited by very steep cliffs sometimes reaching 150 meters in height. The country's average height above sea level is 400 meters and the differential between the highest and lowest points is less than 600 meters. Burkina is thus a rather flat country, with some localized rolling hills.
The term Bura refers to a group of archeological sites in the Niger River valley. This valley crosses the west of the Republic of Niger for 450 km, with a 250 km long and 150 km wide watershed in Burkina which lies between it and the border with Mali.
The Bura necropolis is a large circle, approximately a kilometer in diameter, protected by 10 to 20 meter hills. It was discovered by chance in 1975 about 150 kilometers north-west of Niamey. The excavation site measures 25 m in length and 20 m in width.
This site is similar to that of the Interior Delta of the Niger in Mali where Djenné-Djeno is to be found, with a thematic resemblance between the two in equestrian and anthropomorphic representations.
History
Like all of West Africa, Burkina was inhabited quite early, particularly by hunter-gatherers in the north-western part of the country (12,000 to 5,000 B.C.), whose tools (scrapers, chisels and spears) were discovered in 1973. Farmers appear to have settled there between 3,600 and 2,600 B.C. and their vestiges suggest a relatively enduring settlement.
The use of iron, ceramics and polished stone developed between 1,500 and 1,000 B.C., as did spiritual practices, exemplified by the remainders of burial mounds. Vestiges from the Dogons were discovered in center-north and north-west of the country. These people would eventually leave the region between the 15th and 16th centuries A.D. to settle in the cliffs of Bandiagara.
The first Bura archeological site was discovered in 1975, 150 kilometers north-west of Niamey in the Volta River delta in Niger, in the region controlled by the Songhaï Empire from the 7th to the 16th centuries. Terra cotta pieces such as heads, urns and pottery are found in abundance in this region.
Funeral urns in phallic forms were made to be placed in the tomb of their deceased amongst personal effects such as arrowheads, lances, clothing, teeth and bones. Some are very tall (80 centimeters) and are topped off with small heads giving them a Giacometti-like aspect. Then, a « baura » was put on the tomb with its opening looking the skies, exactly like our tombstones or burial plaques.
These were accompanied by pots, other urns and heads representing family members of the deceased, all in terra cotta. The Bura Asinda-Sikka heads are generally completely flat, and are characterized by their great simplicity and, in the majority of the cases, are decorated with raised bumps running the length of the piece.
Culture
The people living in these areas were death-worshippers.
Their commemorative funerary terra cotta is evidence of this, whether they be this phallic urn, large pots to put the deceased into, heads, or vases.
What constitutes Bura work is from one of three types of sites. It is not always easy to distinguish them, but the UNESCO website informs us more precisely:
- sites with burial mounds characterized by a particular kind of large pot as a coffin, or anthropomorphic funeral urns made up of surmounted heads of statuettes, made to be placed on the ground and, in the case of the Asinda-Sikka, containing human skeletons. These sites come from two distinct archaeological groups:
- sites for religious altars and ritual ceremonies characterized by accumulations of large blocks of stone forming a flattened mound or flat area for the Asinda-Sikka, Karey-Tondi, Jajé-Tondi and Mebera-Tondi. There, one finds fragments of the feet of tripod vases and fragments of pottery in the form of small painted cylinders.
- sites of dwellings difficult to identify. But the discovery of fragments of tripod vases and sometimes of small accumulations and alignments of large blocks of stone testifies to a human presence. Chips of quarzites or flint can also be found on the site along with arrows and thin ceramics from the Kosendo-Gorizo located to the west of the burial mound, behind a hill.
The general layout of the Bura system seems to focus on two poles, the religious burial mound and the religious altar. The burial mound is almost always located in a protected place. On this surface, only 150 m2 was dug, up to the level of the skeletons at 3 meters depth.
Aesthetics
In a Bura burial mound, the coffin/pot or funerary anthropomorphic terra cotta urn was initially placed on the ground but was eventually covered by the winds, after the 13th century.
The funeral urns are generally surmounted human-like heads of statuettes, generally in an anthropomorphic form. Thus, one distinguishes:
- long or tabular vases with a phallic form, from 70 to 80 centimeters high and from 10 to 30 centimeters in diameter, surmounted either by whole statuettes of the character or a rider with his mount. These vases are used as supports for the statuettes and sometimes form their body.
- hemispherical vases from 20 to 40 cm in height and from 10 to 30 cm in diameter, generally surmounted with statuette heads.
- semi-ovoid earthenware jars from approximately 50 to 70 cm high and from 40 to 60 cm in diameter supporting either of the complete statuettes or heads of statuettes.
Geological expertise reveals that use of these burial mounds started in the 2nd or 3rd century A.D. and finally came to an end during an especially arid period in the beginning of the 13th century A.D..
These statuettes and other objects from the Bura archeological site are the subject of intense illicit traffic. The excavation site is on ICOM's red list.
