to capture water, but instead to court yard-centered house plans. Examples Impluvia have been observed in many West/Central-African architectural traditions, including those of the Igbo, Yoruba, Edo, Jola and Bamum. These ranged in complexity: Yoruba impluvia, referred to as akodi, sometimes only amounted to pots placed at the corners of vast rectilinear courtyards, while some in Ketu, Benin Republic, were drained into underground tanks. Commoners in the Benin kingdom usually had houses with multiple impluvia in their one or two court spaces, sometimes drained out of the house by pipes. As Nevadomsky et al. note, these impluvia were meant to remove rain water so that the open roof could be used as a light source and source of fresh air. While many previous examples have been rectilinear, the impluvia of Senegal could also be designed around round floor plans; this has become the basis for the 'Case à Impluvium" in Ziguinchor, Senegal, a centre of the arts run by the Alliance Franco-Sénégalaise. Origins 19th and 20th century European travelers were often surprised to find parallels to classical culture in those architectural traditions that had clear ones: "In the Bamum area there is an interesting type of hut. In referring to it Ankermann says: "The men's houses (Herrenhäuser) in Bamum, in contrast to those of the women, show a most complicated structure. I was very much astonished when I entered for the first time to find myself in an actual Roman atrium with an impluvium in the middle, with the roof sloping towards the middle, and supported by columns". This resulted in a number of theories attempting to tie West and Central African impluvium to Greco-Roman, Egyptian, and Portuguese influences. While Kalaous rejects the possibility of Portuguese influence, he writes that "The Old Mediterranean influence seems to be more plausible but did not necessarily come via Egypt... Of course, this does not prove that there were contacts between the Etruscans and the peoples of what is now Southern Nigeria, but the existence of impluvium there (and elsewhere in West Africa) is certainly not easy to explain in terms of a quite independent origin." Denyer, on the other hand, notes that "No really large settlement could have taken place in this area [Southern Nigeria] before a means of collecting water had been found", to save for the dry season and to manage erosion. Most bluntly, Nevadomsky et al. write that "One need