Relocate, Aggregate, or Fortify?: Exploring Local Responses to Atlantic Era Entanglement in Southeastern Senegal

Summary

The 16-19th centuries in West Africa marked a period of dramatic social and cultural change fueled, in part, by the opening of Atlantic markets and the rise of predatory states. The responses of societies peripheral to these political economic processes often involved strategic shifts in the production of space—including relocation to highland refuge areas, aggregation into larger villages, increases in residential mobility, and fortification of elite houses and/or entire settlements. In this paper we compare historical and archaeological evidence to model the ways in which physical and social dimensions of landscape shaped, and were shaped by, these strategies in the Senegambia and elsewhere across West Africa. In so doing, we also consider the interplay between these spatial strategies and local constellations of power and authority. Applying this model to preliminary data from our archaeological research in southeastern Senegal, we offer some hypotheses about the origins of socio-spatial relations among the Bedik, Peul, and Malinke communities living today in this region.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Fire, Food, Farms, and Fortifications: Recent Advances in the Archaeology of Africa

Keywords

Spatial Coverage