Begho's power came from geography. Situated along the savanna-forest ecotone, it occupied the precise zone where the products of the forest -- gold, kola, and timber -- could be exchanged for the goods of the Sahel and Sahara: salt, textiles, brass, and glass beads. The Nyarko quarter, home to the Brong population, shows the earliest occupation, with radiocarbon dates reaching back before the 11th century. By the 15th century, Jula traders of Soninke Wangara descent had established their own peripheral settlements and integrated into the city's commercial networks. The Kramo quarter housed Mande-speaking Muslims, complete with dye pits for textile production. The Dwinfuor quarter specialized in metallurgy. Between them lay the market quarter, where the transactions that gave the city its name took place daily.

Archaeologists identified between 1,000 and 1,500 house mounds spread across a six-square-mile zone, suggesting a peak population of 7,000 to 10,000 people. Houses were built around courtyards, with rooms no larger than three by four meters and floors raised above the courtyard level by 15 to 25 centimeters. At least one complete pot containing chicken bones was found buried beneath a house floor, a foundation offering that hints at the ritual life woven into domestic construction. Spindle whorls appeared in every quarter, evidence that textile production was widespread. Arabic sources noted Begho's fame for its cloth, and the strip-weaving techniques practiced here may have laid early foundations for the Akan kente weaving tradition. Iron was smithed into arrowheads, knives, hoe blades, and spurs. Brass, imported from multiple sources, was worked into jewelry and weights that followed the Islamic measurement system.

Unlike fortified trading centers such as Kano or Zaria, Begho had no town wall. Archaeologists found no signs of defensive architecture at all, a notable absence that suggests a remarkably peaceful commercial culture. The city's openness was both physical and social: multiple ethnic and religious communities lived in distinct quarters but participated in shared economic life. Brass vessels inspired by Islamic ceremonial forms were repurposed as shrine vessels within Akan religious practice. Trade goods became ritual objects, and ritual objects facilitated trade. This porosity extended outward as well. Pottery scatter stretches four to five kilometers beyond the core settlement, marking short-term farm shelters called pataa where yams were cultivated and crops were processed seasonally. The city breathed through its edges, with no hard line between urban and rural life.

Oral traditions place Begho's destruction in the mid-18th century at the hands of the Ashanti Empire. The population dispersed, seeding new communities across the region. The city of Kong in what is now Ivory Coast and the town of Bondoukou both trace their founding populations to refugees who fled Begho. The city persisted in diminished form into the early 19th century, but its commercial centrality was gone. What survived was cultural influence: pottery traditions, religious practices, and the memory of a place where trade flowed freely and walls were unnecessary. Excavations by the University of Ghana from 1970 to 1979, joined by UCLA in the final year, mapped what the elephant grass had hidden. Today, Hani villagers continue to build with earth drawn from the collapsed houses of their predecessors, an unbroken chain of material reuse connecting the modern village to the medieval city beneath it.