Organisers: Geoff Bailey, Karen Hardy and Abdoulaya Camara
From 8-11 April 2008, shell midden afficionados from around the world congregrated on the Musée Théodore Monod d’Art Africain in Dakar, Senegal for a workshop entitled “Shell Energy: Prehistoric Coastal Resources Strategies”. The meeting was organised by Geoff Bailey and Karen Hardy at the University of York (UK), together with Abdoulaya Camara and a dedicated team of helpers from Senegal.
With papers spanning from the Pleistocene to the present, and including Africa, Europe, the Americas and Asia-Pacific, the scope was wide and the contributions diverse. The papers were supplemented by two fieldtrips; the first to the Saloum Delta to see ‘midden-making in action’ at current oyster-processing locales, and the second to the historic Goree Island whose beauty belied a past founded on the West African slave trade.
Archaeomalacology Working Group 