Shea Parklands Face Various Threats – Can Archaeobotany Help Preserve Them? (by Alexa Höhn and Peter Lovett)

Traditional forms of land use in West Africa often include the integration of useful indigenous trees into the farmscapes. Economically and culturally, the shea tree is the most important among them. The collection of shea nuts and the production of shea butter are culturally deeply embedded, being the major and staple edible oil of the ecological zone, and a welcome source of income, especially for women. However, shea populations are increasingly threatened by agricultural mechanization, industrialization and intensification, including loss of fallow periods. Numerous actors from the public and the private sector are working on solutions such as providing seedlings to farmers, developing early fruiting varieties of the tree and promoting the relevance of replanting trees in the farmscapes. With many players already involved and a vast number of projects implemented, is it feasible to think that archaeobotany has anything to contribute the preservation of shea parklands? However, before we explore this question, we should take a closer look at what shea actually contributes to people’s well-being, and what are these remarkable parklands.

Benefits for rural populations

The most valuable product of the shea tree is its seeds, the source of shea butter, which is traditionally used as a staple edible fat, in personal care, as a source of illumination, and for ritual and medicinal purposes.  As a global commodity, shea butter generates more than two billion US dollars in international trade (see https://www.thebusinessresearchcompany.com/report/shea-butter-global-market-report ). It is mostly used by the confectionery industry as an ingredient in cocoa butter equivalents, with cosmetics manufacturers purchasing only about ten percent of the global market. Shea nut collection and shea butter production are part of the traditional diversified livelihood portfolio of rural women in the savanna regions and provides them with a welcome source of cash, especially during the lean season. However, local shea butter producing women encounter various obstacles in order to tap into external economies of scale (Ayelazuno & Yaro 2024). Instead, traders to international buyers and industrial processors receive the largest share of shea valorization the product (Laube et al. 2017), much like the cocoa or coffee trade: smallholders benefit the least in the global value chain.

Shea trees in the landscape

Unlike introduced exotic tree crop species such as cashew, mango or cocoa, shea is not grown in orchards or plantations. Shea butter is therefore often marketed as “wild”, which is not completely wrong, but at the same time not correct. While shea trees themselves are not fully domesticated, they are important constituents of a West African domesticated landscape: In traditional land use, selected shea trees, and, to a lesser extent certain indigenous useful trees, are not cut down during field preparation. Others, considered useless in the farmscapes, are cut and eventually diminish in numbers. Through these actions, which follow the logic of indigenous knowledge about resource creation and management, shea trees become dominant. Despite being non-domesticated trees, they are still a deliberate component of land use systems. In the savannazone of West Africa, these domesticated landscapes in the sense of Erickson (2008) are called parks or parklands, because they reminded early European botanists of the managed vegetation of English oak parks or French chestnut tree groves (Aubréville 1938, Pullan 1974). Today, shea parklands stretch from Senegal to Sudan and cover more than 3 million km² with an estimated 1.84 billion trees (Naughton et al. 2015).

Connecting the present to the past

Historical records for the consumption and trade of shea butter in West Africa date back to the travels of Ibn-Battuta in the 14^th century CE (Ibn-Battuta, as in Hamdun & King 1994). However, the first written record of shea tree management is only about 220 years old: The Scottish explorer Mungo Park described how shea is not planted, but rather that in clearing woodland, every tree but the shea is cut (1858 (1799)). Archaeobotany, the analysis of botanical finds preserved in archaeological sites, can take us further back in time. Two types of shea macro-remains preserve for thousands of years in West African archaeological sites: fragments of wood charcoal and those of carbonised seed coats. The oldest archaeobotanical evidence of shea tree exploitation to date comes from northern Burkina Faso, where shea wood was burned some 3,000 years ago (Kahlheber 2004). The oldest evidence for shelling shea seeds, possibly for the production of shea butter, dates to the early centuries of the Common Era, in Mali and Burkina Faso (see data at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11385690). In such sites, shea wood charcoal often dominates, possibly indicating an already established dominance of the tree in their surroundings (Höhn et al. submitted). With further analyses of quantifiable charcoal assemblages, changes in shea charcoal ratios over time may become a proxy for the success of management practices. In this case, archaeobotany would not only provide information about the beginning, where and when of shea parklands, but ultimately more information about the sustainability of these practices in the past.

Threats

Today, shea management is increasingly unsustainable. The regeneration of shea trees takes time, time that is lost through agricultural intensification. The existence of shea parklands is closely linked to rotational cultivation, in which fallow periods of at least 15 to 20 years allow shea saplings to (re)reach the fruiting stage before the field is cultivated again. As fallow periods are reduced or eliminated, shea seedlings are regularly uprooted when fields are tilled. This is exacerbated by increasing mechanization: Tree roots are also grubbed up, preventing any regeneration from rootstocks, tractor ploughing, especially when contracted out to inexperienced operators, endangers the mature trees and prevents establishment of new seedlings in the fields. Bush burning is impeding shea, as shea seedlings are not as fire-resistant as mature trees. And the extensive use of herbicides kills broadleaf trees, particularly seedlings. A direct threat to existing shea populations is charcoal production. With other fuel sources already depleted, shea wood charcoal has become an attractive but short-sighted source of high-quality fuel and additional income. Shea charcoal production is particularly unsustainable given the current regeneration issues. Natural regeneration still takes place in regions with less population pressure and in bush fields that are not intensively cultivated. However, with increasing land use conversion and the commercialisation of agriculture, intensification continues to threaten all shea populations.

The possible contribution of archaeobotanical knowledge

Archaeobotanical knowledge cannot contribute practical knowledge to or improve practices for the conservation of shea parklands, as can fields such as agricultural sciences, agroeconomic or social studies. Rather, archaeobotanical knowledge contributes to the understanding of these landscapes, their development and their evolution over time.  Archaeobotanical evidence that people have been creating domesticated landscapes of which shea is a constituent in the West African savanna for at least two-thousand years, adds an additional perspective to the significance of preserving these parklands. This knowledge specifically supports that planting new (shea) trees is therefore not the transformation of a natural savanna into a forest but the only measure to counteract the impending “deforestation” of this “old” domesticated savanna vegetation. Preventing its transformation into an eventually treeless cropland would also preserve shea butter as a staple food that has fed and continues to feed hundreds of millions of people. Secondly, archaeobotanical evidence underscores that these domesticated landscapes are a unique cultural heritage, a cultural landscape shaped by generations of people. It also shows that people in West Africa have developed a well-adapted, productive and sustainable land-use system that has functioned for millennia, well before Arab and European influence. In order to learn more about the perceptions of these landscapes in the past, about social and cultural norms that drove and controlled their management, it is crucial to tap into indigenous knowledge. This knowledge may be difficult to tap into; the Atlantic slave trade and colonial demands most certainly disrupted the traditional farming system and the culturally embedded landscape concepts. Still, the effort to better explore indigenous knowledge regarding the long tradition of landscape management should be a worthwhile endeavour.

References

Aubréville A. 1938. La fôret coloniale: les fôrets de l’Afrique occidentale francaise. Paris, Acad. Des Sci. Coloniales (Ann. Acad. Des Sci. Coloniales 9).

Ayelazuno, R.A., Yaro, J.A. Shea butter livelihoods and challenges faced by women in the Kassena Nankana districts, Ghana. SN Soc Sci 4, 18 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-023-00810-8

Erickson C.L. 2008. Amazonia: The Historical Ecology of a Domesticated Landscape. In: Silverman H., Isbell W.H. (eds) The Handbook of South American Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY, pp. 157-183. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-74907-5_11

Hamdun S., King, N. Q.  1994. Ibn Battuta in Black Africa. Princeton.

Höhn A., Dueppen, S. A., Gallagher D., Lammers L. submitted. The archaeology of shea parklands (Vitellaria paradoxa) in Burkina Faso. Journal of Global Archaeology.

Kahlheber S. 2004. Perlhirse und Baobab: Archäobotanische Untersuchungen im Norden Burkina Fasos. (PhD thesis Goethe University Frankfurt/Main).

Laube W., Awo, M. A., Derbile, E. K. 2017. Smallholder Integration into the Global Shea Nut Commodity Chain in Northern Ghana. Bonn, Center for Development Research (ZEF Working Paper Series 153).

Naughton C. C., Lovett P. N., Mihelcic J.R. 2015. Land suitability modeling of shea (Vitellaria paradoxa) distribution across sub-Saharan Africa. Applied Geography 58, pp. 217-227. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2015.02.007

Park M. 1858 (1799). Travels in the Interior of Africa. Edinburgh.

Pullan R. A. 1974.  Farmed parkland in West Africa. Savanna 3(2), pp. 119-131.

please cite as:

Alexa Höhn & Peter Lovett (2024). Shea parklands face various threats – Can archaeobotany help preserve them? Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa – Blog. Retrieved (date) from https://miasa.hypotheses.org/?p=3673

Authors:

Alexa Höhn is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Archaeological Sciences, Goethe University in Frankfurt. She is an archaeobotanist interested in human-environment interactions and subsistence practices in African prehistory.

Peter Lovett, with over three decades of research and business development experience in the shea zone of East, West and Central Africa, is currently an executive director of eco restore, a firm focused on the restoration of regenerative landscapes with indigenous trees.

---

---