Despite a few hiccups in people’s travel plans, everyone arrived in Cotonou last weekend in good spirits and ready to start the field program. We stayed in Cotonou until Monday. Students were able to relax by the hotel pool, visit the lake village of Ganvie, and we even found an amusement park in Cotonou which was great fun (the bumper cars was a particular favorite).

On Monday, we travelled west to Whydah, where we toured the Portuguese fort (now a museum), the Huedan Python Temple, and the beach from whence human beings were exported by the kingdom of Hueda first, and later the kingdom of Dahomey.







Later on Monday, we were able to hike out to the royal palace precinct of Savi, excavated by Kenneth Kelly in the 1990’s. The site is a great introduction to what archaeological sites in Benin look like, as is Ken’s collection of artifacts from Savi, which is on display in the Whydah museum.

Later that day, we made our way up to Abomey, and from Tuesday through Wednesday we settled into our dig house. During the day students were introduced to the history of the region and the archaeological field methods used by the projects and were able to explore Abomey a bit at night. I am pleased to report that this is a very eager group of students, and everyone is absorbing all I am throwing at them at a very fast pace.


We started excavation on Thursday, focusing on an area discovered during survey in 2007 which contained a number of large architectural features (two large building mounds, and two large depressions which may be trash pits). The cluster of features is located around 400 meters south of an eighteenth-century royal palace at Cana. We think this may reflect the southwestern border of the town in that period and we are hoping to clarify the chronology of this area through excavation.

Everyone launched right into the work eagerly. Days filled picking, hoeing, carrying buckets, and note-taking haven’t phased anyone yet, and we are starting to trace the outline of one of the main buildings at the site. We are starting to recover some interesting artifacts which will help us understand the site better, and we anticipate interesting finds to come in the coming days.

J. Cameron Monroe
July 26th 2009
Abomey, Bénin