From kinship to kingship: an African journey into complexity

In Africa, where kinship provided the underlying structure of society, social networks and ritual power appear to be at the core of the notion of power and the emergence of political complexity. In studying those developments, and how African political systems challenged simplistic neo-evolutionary models as they kept moving back and forth from lineage to kingdom, it may be useful to focus first on understanding how egalitarian societies became centralised states with a king. Although many famous kingdoms of the continent have flourished in the past, little is known about their origins. In order to use archaeology to study those processes, we need a better understanding of the nature of kingship, and thus to find ways to identify the sacred dimension of power in the African archaeological record. In that perspective, we should focus on the remains of palaces and precolonial cities, as well as on burial centres and regalia.