Archaeological Review from Cambridge - 23.2 - 2008 Mobility Strategies and their Social and Economic Implications for Late Stone Age Sahelian Pastoral Groups: A View from the Lower Tilemsi Valley, Eastern Mali K. M. Manning St Hugh’s College University of Oxford katie.manning@st-hughs.oxford.ac.uk A cross the Sahara and the Sahelian zones of West Africa, the osteo- logical remains and rock art depictions of livestock, and in particular of cattle, attest to a flourishing pastoral economy during the mid to late Holocene. To what extent these populations were nomadic or culturally ‘complex’ is, however, still a matter of considerable debate (Brooks 2006, MacDonald 1998, 1999; Tafuri et al. 2006). In recent years, mobility has emerged as a prime strategy amongst Sahelian populations for coping with the vagaries of climate and/or social and political upheaval. Across the Sahelian zones of West Africa, the Fulbe have undertaken extensive rural-rural migrations 1 in a mitigation strategy against climatic deteriora- tion that has not only led to an increasingly symbiotic relationship with sedentary agricultural populations, but also to a degree of administrative invisibility (De Bruijn and Van Dijk 2003). Equally, competition with agri- culturalists, as seen today in Nigeria (Blench 1999) and the Darfur region of Sudan (Robinson 2004), for example, has resulted in increasing ideo- logical and political marginalisation of pastoralists. Such contemporary