Caravans of Gold

The recognition of unseen or unaccounted for art histories, and the interdisciplinary methodologies that are required to give them form and voice, are among the contributions of globalism to the intellectual discourse in the arts. This paper will consider the fruitful juncture of art history and archaeology in excavating a past that has been rendered largely invisible, using the exhibition "Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa" as a case study. "Caravans of Gold" shifts the conventional study of the “medieval period" by looking at it from the perspective of the Sahara Desert and addressing its expansive reach into Europe, the Middle East, and West Africa’s forest region. This history is brought to light through an innovative curatorial approach in which fragments from key archaeological sites are juxtaposed with works of art from the period, passages from contemporaneous texts, and objects of more recent date that show the past’s legacy into the present day. With archaeological fragments to ground them, these sources activate “the archaeological imagination”, our ability to imagine the past through its remains. The case study of “Caravans of Gold” demonstrates how methodologies drawn from archaeology can provide a means for building new art histories that make the past visible, and makes it tangible within the space of the art museum.