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An analysis of the chronological distinctions between the ceramics of the Hodh depression and the inland Djoliba River delta help validate what is known about the Soninké population and the founding of Wagadou.
Scholars have long thought that the Tichitt culture was created by proto Mandé speakers. According to Kevin Macdonald in the absence of archeological evidence this is linguistic speculation. There is almost a 1000 year gap between the terminal Akinjeir phase of the Tichitt culture and the onset of dynastic Wagadu.
Until recently the connection between the two cultures was deemed far fetched. Kevin Macdonald’s research of the Faita Facies dated around 400 BC as well as recent data published on dry stone masonry building systems both of which exist on the inland Djoliba River Delta of Mali provide evidence of a large geographic extant of the Tichitt culture. However from a chronological perspective neither of these pieces of evidence is enough to shorten the near millennium chronological gap between Tichitt and Wagadu.
Ann Mayor’s operation sequence analysis of the corded roulette ceramics systems of Tichitt and their distinctions in relation to the concave matted ceramics utilized by various Mandé populations adds support to a primary ancestral component of Djoliba River Valley populations along the Hapi River Basin. The migration of this technique from east to west follows the establishment of the Wangara inter empire by populations classified by Greenbergian linguists as Nilo Saharan. Here long standing historical relationship between the Zaghawa, Zaghai(Songhai), Wangarawa and polities such as Ngalam, Zaghara and Taghara must be noted.
In the current state of research, a discontinuity characterizes settlement during the first millennium B.C.E. in most Sahelian regions, obscuring the transition between the Neolithic and the first populations who mastered iron metallurgy, and reflecting economic change as well as the establishment of new groups in previously uninhabited regions (Breunig and Neumann 2002; Mayor et al. 2005). Next, between the first millennium B.C.E. and the first millennium C.E., two migrations were probably responsible for a large component of the protohistoric populations in the Niger Bend, one from the northwest with the complex societies of the Dhars of Mauritania (MacDonald 1996; MacDonald et al. 2004, 2009) and the other from the northeast with populations previously mastering iron metallurgy in Niger (Vernet 1996).
The technique of pounding in a concave form today is widespread by potters living across the Sahelian band, with the Inland Niger Delta forming its extreme western extension (Huysecom 1996). According to Sterner and David (2003), this technique originates between Chad and Sudan, as an early form integrating a simple depression hollowed in the ground, covered or not by a mat, and the use of a stone pestle. Nilo-Saharan potters, migrating east and west of the Lake Chad Basin, then began using a truncated conical clay pestle (type 1) during the first millennium B.C.E. Sterner and David assume that it arrived in the Niger River region with Songhay populations during the first millennium C.E. and would have gradually spread to their neighbors during the second millennium. Other groups invented the stumpy cylindrical clay pestle (type 2).
The existence of clay pestles from Oualedji that are derived from the Kushite Haddadienne culture of the Lake Tchad Basin buttresses this migratory vector. The burial commonalities between El Oualedji and the Kerman/C Group traditions of the Hapi River Valley are further confirmation linking these two populations (Faraji; 2022)
