Lamine Badji is an archaeologist with a multidisciplinary background (social and cultural anthropology and bio-archaeology), at the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar (Senegal).
My research focuses on the griots, an endogamous socio-professional category present in most West African societies and governed by a caste system. They play various social roles that go beyond the realm of music, for which they are known in historical and anthropological literature. Traditionally, they were responsible for archiving, but also for passing on important events in the societies where they lived. So, as producers of historical narratives or story tellers, griots act as historians. They're also major players in political life, serving as advisors and diplomats in African royal courts.
I am particularly interested in this community among the Wolof and Sereer of northwestern Senegal, where its members occupy a rather special position in the social landscape. They are distinguished, among other things, by the funerary practices that are specific to them, in particular their burial in the cavities of baobabs, an emblematic tree of the savannahs of West Africa. The traces of this funerary practice, definitively abandoned in the 2000s, can be found in the northwest of Senegal. My research on this landscape focuses on the inventory and mapping of the baobabs housing the remains of griots, known as ‘baobabs à griot’. By studying these burials, which fascinate by the complexity of its socio-cultural underpinnings, I have also been interested in the processes of identity formation of griots, a perspective that I approach, following a biocultural approach.
At the dawn of the post-colonial period (1960-1970), a large number of osteological remains belonging to griot individuals had been collected from baobab trees by expatriate researchers from the Institut Fundamental d'Afrique Noire (IFAN) of the Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar, founded during the French colonization. Today, the collection resulting from this research is still curated at the IFAN Laboratory of Archaeology, where they have been the subject of various experiments, through research and the training of generations of anthropologists, including myself. I am interested in the history of the griot individuals whose remains are at the IFAN. I evoke this history in relation to colonial research, in an ongoing publication work entitled: "The Pain in the Archaeological Archives: Griots Remains in IFAN's Anthropological Collections (Senegal)".
I wrote this paper as part of the Rewriting World Archaeology/Africa program, a mentoring programme aimed at equipping young researchers in African archaeology with the skills in scientific writing. In 2023, while I was doing an internship at the Harvard’s Department of the Human Evolutionary Biology, on ancient DNA analysis, my supervisor Dr. Kendra Sirak shared with me the call for the recruitment of a cohort, for the program that year. That's how I enthusiastically prepared my application, which was later selected.
Participating in this programme has been an opportunity for me, as an early career researcher from Africa. Through this programme, I was able to benefit from the experience and supervision of archaeologists and editors of world-renowned journals in archaeology such as Antiquity. In addition to providing myself with the tools necessary to understand the workings of scientific publishing, this programme has allowed me to build a network with other researchers. This experience at the beginning of my research career is of great importance. Indeed, I have just joined a post-doc position in the MAEASaM Project, for Senegal. I am sure that the skills acquired in RWA/Africa will be of great use to me.
I would advise young researchers not to hesitate to submit their application with enthusiasm to the next call for recruitment.