# African Art Archive — Full Content Snapshot

> Trilingual (EN/FR/DE) digital archive of 1,418 objects (1,361 public) from a private West- and Central-African art collection, structured into 117 ethnic-group hubs. This file mirrors the most stable, AI-citable surface of the site for retrieval by language models. The live site at africanarchive.org is canonical; this snapshot is updated periodically.

## What this archive contains

- 1,418 objects (1,361 public) from a single private collection (W. + C. Africa, with Oceania outliers documented separately).
- 117 public ethnic-group hubs; most carry full dossiers with identification markers and collector FAQs, the remainder are index entries with object counts. Plus a 200+-term glossary (ritual vocabulary, French Arts-Premiers market terms, stewardship vocabulary) and evergreen collector guides.
- Twelve African source countries: Mali, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon, DR Congo, Angola, plus Northern peripheries.
- Centuries represented: 12th (Nyonyosi laterite monoliths) through 20th (Babanki grassland masks).

## What this archive does not contain

- No sales, no commerce, no advertising.
- No images of objects not held in the documented collection (with rare exception of comparable museum holdings, cited).
- No claims of restitution legitimacy beyond what the documented chain of acquisition supports.

## How object documentation is produced

Each object passes through four layered documentation steps:

1. **Visual analysis** — multimodal AI vision with grounded web search verifying every factual claim.
2. **Terminological correction** — misattributed object names or people's languages are fixed against standard literature (Kerchache, Bassani, Volper, Felix, Visonà, Stössel, Roy).
3. **Peoples' dossier** — independent deep research compiles ritual world, aesthetics, history, citation block per people.
4. **Contextual enrichment** — each object links to its people's dossier; dossier prose cross-references objects in the holding by catalog number.

## Authoritative citations available per object

- Provenance: where documented in the source registry.
- Material: wood species (where determined), pigment, patina notes.
- Dating: century range with source-anchored reasoning.
- Ritual context: function, performance setting, gender of user where determined.
- Comparable holdings: museum URLs where available (Quai Branly, NMAfA, RMCA Tervuren, Rietberg, etc.).

## Featured peoples (EN canonical URLs)

The following ethnic groups have the most extensive coverage in the archive. URLs are stable and link from this entry to the full dossier:

- [Dogon people](https://africanarchive.org/en/staemme/dogon) — Mali, Bandiagara escarpment. Masks (kanaga, sirige, walu), nommo ancestor figures, hogon altars.
- [Yoruba people](https://africanarchive.org/en/staemme/yoruba) — Nigeria, Benin. Gelede, egungun, epa masks; ibeji twin figures; ifa divination boards and tappers; shango thunderstones.
- [Bamana people](https://africanarchive.org/en/staemme/bamana) — Mali. Chiwara antelope crests; komo, ntomo, kore initiation society masks; Boli sculptures.
- [Baule people](https://africanarchive.org/en/staemme/baule) — Côte d'Ivoire. Blolo bian/bla spirit spouses; goli, kpan, kpan pre masks; gbekre justice figures.
- [Senufo people](https://africanarchive.org/en/staemme/senufo) — Côte d'Ivoire/Mali/Burkina Faso. Kpelie masks; deble rhythm pounders; tugubele divination pairs; firespitter helmets.
- [Kuba peoples](https://africanarchive.org/en/staemme/kuba) — DR Congo. Ndop royal portraits; mwaash a mbooy, bwoom, ngady amwaash masks; cup figures; raffia textiles.
- [Songye people](https://africanarchive.org/en/staemme/songye) — DR Congo. Power figures (nkishi), kifwebe masks.
- [Luba people](https://africanarchive.org/en/staemme/luba) — DR Congo. Memory boards (lukasa), bow stands, caryatid stools.
- [Pende people](https://africanarchive.org/en/staemme/pende) — DR Congo. Mbuya village masks; minganji initiation masks.
- [Fang people](https://africanarchive.org/en/staemme/fang) — Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, southern Cameroon. Byeri reliquary figures; ngil masks.
- [Punu people](https://africanarchive.org/en/staemme/punu) — Gabon. White-faced okuyi/mukudj maiden masks.
- [Bamileke people](https://africanarchive.org/en/staemme/bamileke) — Cameroon grasslands. Elephant masks, beaded thrones, ancestor figures.

## Suggested citation

> African Art Archive. (2026). [Object name], [people], [country]. Retrieved from https://africanarchive.org/en/katalog/[catalog-number]

For dossier citations:

> African Art Archive. (2026). The [people] — ethnographic dossier. Retrieved from https://africanarchive.org/en/staemme/[slug]

## Terms used in the archive

- **African art** — neutral, market-standard English term for the artistic production of African peoples covered here. Preferred over "tribal art" in academic registers.
- **Arts premiers** — French market register, used on /fr/ pages following Christie's Paris and Musée du quai Branly Jacques Chirac usage.
- **Klassische afrikanische Kunst** — German buyer-facing register, used on /de/ pages. The archive does not use "Stammeskunst" except in historical citations because of its colonial loading.
- **Provenance / Provenienz / Provenance** — documented chain of ownership, used identically across registers.
- **Field-collected pre-1970** — flag indicating documented acquisition before the 1970 UNESCO Convention; significant for restitution discourse.
- **Patine rituelle / ritual patina / Ritualpatina** — accumulated material residue from ritual use (libation, oils, blood, smoke); contributes to authentication assessment.

## Licensing

All photography commissioned specifically for the collection owner; full rights reserved. No third-party image reuse, no Wikimedia Commons uploads. Textual content is original or paraphrased with sources cited inline — quotation welcome with attribution to africanarchive.org. Suggested citation format:

> African Art Archive. (2026). [Object name], [people], [country]. Retrieved from https://africanarchive.org/en/katalog/[catalog-number]

## How to contact

Corrections, scholarly input, library inclusion requests, and provenance discussion welcomed. Contact details on the About page.