Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange Across Medieval Saharan Africa edited by Kathleen Bickford Berzock

Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time puts fragments to work. The book, edited by Kathleen Bickford Berzock, is the companion publication to the exhibition of the same name that opened in January 2019 at the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, traveled to Toronto's Aga Khan Museum in September 2019, and was planned for the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in April 2020 (delayed due to the Smithsonian's temporary closure to contain the spread of COVID-19). With 250 objects from 35 lenders, the exhibition highlights material products of West Africa from the eighth through the fifteenth centuries, when a large-scale trade network stretched across the Sahara, moving gold, salt, and enslaved people along with ceramics, copper, glass beads, ivory, leather, and textiles, over great distances. While some objects from this epoch have survived mostly intact—the exhibition and publication feature stunning examples of terracotta and copper-alloy...