Kathleen Bickford Berzock

An absolutely beautifully illustrated book, Caravans of Gold is part collection of essays, part catalogue accompanying a museum exhibition. It focuses on the material and cultural wealth of medieval West Africa and its connections with the wider world through trans-Saharan trade. The nineteen chapters are divided into four sections: Groundwork (theory, historiography, descriptions of heritage preservation projects in Mali, Morocco, and Nigeria); Sites (a series of archaeological case show more studies), Matter in Motion (thematic case studies of specific material, types of objects, etc) and Reverberations (later historical impact through to the present day.) The essays are pretty uniformly clearly written and should be accessible to undergraduate students and the generally interested reader. show less