Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange Across Medieval Saharan Africa

Kathleen Bickford Berzock. (ed.) 2019. Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange Across Medieval Saharan Africa. Evanston: Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University and Princeton: Princeton University Press. 312 pp.

Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time is a companion to a groundbreaking exhibition at the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University (2019), the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto (2019-20), and the National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C. (2020). Both the book and the exhibition examine the history of the Saharan region by showcasing medieval remains from Mali, Morocco, and Nigeria and highlighting Africa's central role in world history, before the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism. More than thirty institutions lent items for the exhibit, including those from Canada, Mali, Morocco, Nigeria, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Edited by Kathleen Bickford Berzock, a specialist in African art history and associate director of the Block Museum of Art, the book is intended to appeal to both scholars and general readers.

Twenty-one authors contributed to the book, including archaeologists, art historians, curators, and historians from Africa, Europe, and North America. Much more than an exhibition catalog, the book contains a detailed series of essays on medieval Saharan...