Kirikongo

Kirikongo was a settlement in the Mouhoun region of West Africa, occupied for many centuries. By the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries it covered at least thirty hectares and probably housed between one and two thousand people. Farmers lived alongside specialist ironworkers and potters, while authority was less concentrated in the founding household than it had been earlier.

This arrangement followed a major change in the twelfth century. Iron production moved out of the founding house to a mound beyond the residential settlement, pottery became more standardised, and cattle keeping disappeared. Researchers have interpreted these changes as a deliberate reduction of inequality. Fires damaged Kirikongo's central ritual complex twice late in the thirteenth century; each time, the community rebuilt it. Occupation continued into the early modern centuries.