Early evidence for chickens at Iron Age Kirikongo (c. AD 100–1450), Burkina Faso

An excavated sequence from Burkina Faso shows that the Asian jungle fowlGallus gallus, also known as the chicken, had made its way into West Africa by the mid first millennium AD. Using high precision recovery from a well-stratified site, the author shows how the increasing use of chickens could be chronicled and distinguished from indigenous fowl by both bones and eggshell. Their arrival was highly significant, bringing much more than an additional source of food: it put a sacrificial creature, essential for numerous social and economic transactions, in reach of everyone.