Tinto Maps #14 - 9th of August 2024 - Western Africa

[Pavía]

And a last comment/thought for today, on historical demography (which has been a hot topic in some of the Tinto Maps): it is an interesting, but very difficult discipline. The daily basis of pre-Modern historians is not to have censuses, registers, or other types of accurate population data, and instead, having to estimate the population from very varied sources. Those estimates need to be considered a matter of debate, as they depend on the methodology used by each author (which can be fine-tuned over time but is never going to be completely precise). Therefore, when discussing this topic, everybody should be aware that what we present is a proposal based on those estimations, and that it may well be a matter of review, but it's never going to be a closed issue, but one depending on how the existing estimates are considered.

 

[Pavía]

To answer some questions asked here, we needed today's Tinto Talks to be released, to address this topic:

What's stopping an European power from colonising West Africa aside from a likely higher population?

Disease

 

[Pavía]

Hi there! An update after the last Tinto Talks, with the current 'Society of Pops' existing in Western Africa:

A couple of notes about this:
1. This is very far from final )I'd say that the countries are only perfectly fitting around the Lake Chad area).
2. There will be tons of tag changes when we review this Tinto Maps. As you might have noticed, there are plenty of tags that would fit into the different categories, which are not fitting now. We shared this 'placeholdery' stuff on purpose, because we thought that it would be much more efficient to make an in-depth review of the region after receiving your feedback in this DD. We will then share the rework with you, and receive additional feedback about it, as being our usual review loop.

 

[Pavía]

Are Societies of Pops organised so that one culture = one Society of Pop? Or can a culture have multiple societies of Pops associated with it?

One Culture = one Society of Pops.

 

[Pavía]

Any chance you might consider changing this to allow for multiple per culture? Not all sedentary societies in history were politically unified among ethnolinguistic group.

To clarify, that is doable in our script, although there's a limitation to it, which is that all of the pops of a culture in a location must belong to the same tag (although you can have different tags of different cultures present at the same location).

Let's give an example. We can divide the Tuareg people into multiple tags of 'societies of pops' ('Tuareg1', 'Tuareg2', etc.). Those tags can't be present in the same locations, as being 'conformed' by pops of the same culture. However, they can share a location with the tags of the Sao and the Zaghawa people simultaneously.

Pointing out because we might keep or change the design of 'one culture = one society of pops', but those tags will be moddable, in any case.