Shea butter’s roots in West Africa

Vitellaria_paradoxa_MS4195My article with Daphne Gallagher and Stephen Dueppen has been published in the Journal of Ethnobiology! This is the first large-scale analysis of archaeological shea butter nutshells, excavated from the site of Kirikongo in Burkina Faso. For this study, I devised a protocol for sampling and measuring the carbonized nutshells to provide the most reliable data from across multiple contexts at the site. Our results show that the trees have been actively managed for centuries.

Check out the abstract here.

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