Tichitt

Tichitt is the third of the four Mauritanian ksour inscribed together as UNESCO World Heritage in 1996. The town stands on the southern edge of the Tagant Plateau, on the line of the medieval trans-Saharan caravan trade between the Maghreb and the Niger Bend.

The site has two histories layered on one another. The medieval Islamic town — a stone-and-mortar settlement organised around a central mosque, contemporaneous in foundation with Chinguetti and Ouadane — sits over and adjacent to a much older neolithic and proto-historic landscape known to archaeologists as the Tichitt Tradition, with stone-built villages and dry-stone walls dating back to the second millennium BCE. The medieval town drew on the same stone resources and to some extent the same architectural grammar as its prehistoric predecessors.

Tichitt's historical population peaked at several thousand and declined steeply through the colonial and post-colonial period as the caravan economy collapsed and as the regional water table fell. The modern population is small, the surviving medieval fabric is largely in ruin, and conservation has been constrained by the site's extreme remoteness — Tichitt is reached only by four-wheel-drive on unsealed tracks across the Tagant. Stabilisation work has been more limited than at the other three Mauritanian ksour.