Shea nut processing (shea butter)
Procesado de la nuez de karité (manteca de karité)
- Date
- c. 100 CE · confidence low
- Place
- Kirikongo, Boucle du Mouhoun, Burkina Faso
- Credited to
- Farmers of the West African savanna, mostly women
- Field
- Life & health
What it is
Shea nut shells (Vitellaria paradoxa) at the Kirikongo site show that the tree's fruit was exploited some 1,900 years ago. The kernel, boiled and beaten, yields a vegetable fat used for cooking, anointing and making cosmetics and soap.
The dating comes from the archaeobotanical study of Kirikongo (Gallagher, Dueppen and Walsh, 2016), which places shea use from the first millennium AD and its intensification after 1000; the exact dates are uncertain.
What it led to
- a cooking and anointing fat in the savanna, without dairy cattle
- trade in shea butter across West Africa and, later, Europe
- an economy of women producers, who still dominate processing