ABSTRACT
What a thrill and an honor, and how curious it was to have been invited by Nehemia Levtzion to collaborate in the revision of his beloved Ancient Ghana and Mali (1973). Susan Keech McIntosh, the other archaeologist invited, and I were curious, of course, because archaeology had been minimally represented in Nehemia’s original. (This reflected, of course, the nascent state of the discipline in the Western Sahel as of 1971, the date by which the manuscript was completed and shipped off to the publisher.) Oral traditions were only marginally more present. We were, naturally, delighted (and not surprised) to learn that the other scholar invited to collaborate was David Conrad, with his obsessively encyclopedic command of Mande corpus of traditions. Much had changed since the 1973 publication date.
