Wanar’s standing stones in Senegal are the visible remains of a much more complicated funerary landscape. Excavations have investigated how graves, earth-filled monuments, separate frontal stones and later offerings fitted together. The central mystery is archaeological: what did these structures originally look like, how were they made, and how did their uses change? A sequence of Senegalese–French investigations has supplied increasingly detailed answers while leaving important questions open.
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A particular site within a much larger landscape
UNESCO’s Stone Circles of Senegambia inscription covers four groups: Wanar and Sine Ngayène in Senegal, and Wassu and Kerbatch in The Gambia. They share a wider regional tradition, but each has its own excavated history. Wanar contains twenty-one circles, including a double circle. The property was inscribed in 2006.
A photograph or date attributed to the wider World Heritage property therefore needs a more precise location before it can illustrate Wanar itself. The same applies to a map position. The pin accompanying this case uses UNESCO’s individual Wanar component record, 1226-004. It identifies the public archaeological property; it is not an excavation trench, a particular grave or a visitor entrance.
From an initial trial to sustained excavation
The research mission’s institutional account places Wanar in the Mabo community, Kaffrine region. It records exploratory work in 2005 followed by annual excavation campaigns from 2008 to 2017. Scientific direction involved Hamady Bocoum on the Senegalese side and Luc Laporte on the French side. The account gives an occupation span of the eighth to thirteenth centuries AD, a broad framework within which individual episodes still require dating.
The programme examined architecture and the surrounding deposits alongside the burials. That approach is important because a standing monument’s present outline can conceal earlier structures. A grave, a structure built above it and material placed nearby later may belong to different stages. Establishing their order is a fieldwork question, requiring the relationships between deposits to be recorded rather than inferred solely from what survives above ground.
What the 2012 investigation could date
Laporte and colleagues’ 2012 Antiquity paper describes the early excavation results. One example illustrates the limits of the chronology particularly clearly. Three samples, probably representing three individuals, were submitted for radiocarbon dating, but only one retained enough collagen. That sample produced a calibrated range of AD 1047–1255, with the greatest probability between 1150 and 1230.
The result dated human remains in a specific context. It did not date every circle, every stone or every act of commemoration at the site. The paper used excavated relationships to distinguish burials from the monuments erected above them, and documented continued ceramic deposition during stages of architectural decay. Its authors also warned that the variation within one cemetery had to be understood before wider regional trends could be proposed.
This is a useful way to read an archaeological date: ask what was sampled, where it came from and which event it can actually constrain. A broad site label cannot replace those questions.
Monument I: a sequence beneath the double circle
The project’s detailed Monument I account records four campaigns between 2008 and 2011. The double circle and its eastern alignment overlay a complex burial feature. Observations indicated bodies decomposing in an empty space, subsequent disturbance and additions of other remains. Material associated with different deposits included metal objects and beads. The sequence therefore involved more than a single undifferentiated burial episode.
Above this, the investigators reconstructed an earthen dome and two differently arranged rings of stones. The closely set inner stones and more widely separated outer stones had different architectural roles. A perishable roof was proposed as part of the interpretation. Pottery in front of the monument offered further clues, including a large vessel tentatively interpreted in relation to roof decoration. Those reconstructions combine surviving material with comparison; a complete roof was not preserved for direct inspection.
Funerals, monuments and remembrance
The team’s 2022 regional synthesis placed Wanar within a broader discussion of West African funerary practices. It distinguished burial, later public funerals and subsequent rites through which some deceased people acquired ancestral status. Such activities could be separated by considerable intervals. The authors compared this pattern with archaeological sequences involving graves, monumental construction and commemorative deposits.
The comparison helps explain why material belonging to different moments can accumulate around one monument. It also makes the word “cemetery” less straightforward than a modern visitor might assume: places connected with the dead can remain settings for ceremonies and social relationships long after burial.
Ethnographic comparison remains an interpretive tool. A similarity between a documented recent practice and an excavated arrangement does not by itself identify the ancient builders with a particular present-day community, or recover the words they used for their ceremonies. The 2022 discussion is most useful when its proposed relationships are kept alongside the excavated evidence.
Reading the marks left by the builders
A 2024 study by Matar Ndiaye, Luc Laporte and Jean-Paul Cros examined working traces on Wanar’s monoliths. Its published abstract, introduction and section previews describe a systematic approach to the stones’ dimensions, surfaces and extraction marks. The researchers distinguished stages of obtaining and shaping laterite, including traces left by different forms of tool use.
Their discussion suggests that the visible stone surfaces preserve only parts of the working sequence. Careful finishing can erase earlier traces, while weathering can change a surface after erection. Frontal stones and stones forming circles also differed in their treatment. That gives researchers several questions to test together: which marks belong to extraction, which to finishing, and which changes occurred later?
This case uses the publisher’s available material for that study; a complete reading of its full article has not been established here. Its contribution is a technical investigation of human workmanship, with conclusions tied to recorded marks and the condition of the stones.
Why a Soto stone illustrates this account
The lyre-shaped stone pictured here is a comparative museum object from Soto. The musée du quai Branly’s provenance account records its selection in connection with a 1966 agreement and its placement on deposit by the Senegalese government in 1967. The museum identifies the material as lateritic conglomerate. Its object history is separate from the Wanar excavation sequence.
The photograph makes the distinctive two-branched form visible. Wanar also has bifid frontal stones, but that shared form does not make the museum object a find from Wanar. Keeping provenance attached to an illustration allows comparison without silently changing the evidence.
What remains open
Wanar shows how an archaeological puzzle can change as researchers move from visible outlines to buried relationships, dated samples and worked surfaces. The accounts cited here overlap in authorship and belong to a continuing research programme; successive publications are stages in that work, rather than wholly independent confirmations.
Questions about individual construction dates, the meanings of particular stone forms and the identities of the people commemorated require more than resemblance or a regional label. The surviving evidence supports skilled local construction and a varied funerary history. Its finer interpretation remains open to further excavation, analysis and revision.
Sources and further reading
Mission overview; Antiquity excavation paper (2012), pages 409–427; SEPSEN, Monument I; Regional synthesis (2022), Wanar and funerary-comparison sections; Monolith working-trace study (2024), publisher abstract and previews; UNESCO property record and component map coordinates; museum provenance account.
For another archaeological investigation into monument building and ritual evidence, see the Saudi Arabian mustatils. Return to Other Mysteries or all case files.