Africa: Guinea Coast (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Logan.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Approaches to Slavery and Unfree Labour in Africa" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although the Columbian Exchange had a significant impact on local agroecologies, we still know very little about the African side of the exchange. This is particularly complex knot to unravel given that the Atlantic slave trade peaked during those same centuries. Both processes were to have major impacts on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Cameron Monroe.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Approaches to Slavery and Unfree Labour in Africa" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Demographic historians have posited dramatic population decline across West Africa in the era of the slave trade, the cumulative effects of endemic warfare and the large scale population drain resulting from the export of enslaved peoples to the New World. At the same time, anthropological models for the organization of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kofi Nutor.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper explores the complex history of Atlantic slavery and European colonization in Peki, a frontier Ewe community in present-day southeastern Ghana. This community played a pivotal role that led the pan-Ewe confederacy– the Krepi– out of Akwamu and Asante domination in the mid-nineteenth century. To consolidate their power, the Peki made two major...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Philip De Barros.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Science and African Archaeology: Appreciating the Impact of David Killick" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2013 and 2017 three major smithing sites in the Bitchabe zone of the Bassar region of northern Togo were mapped with GPS: former Bitchabe, Upper Bidjomambe, and Old Bitchobebe, covering 20.3, 14.5, and 5.4 ha, respectively. The sites were variously occupied from the late seventeenth to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emuobosa Orijemie.

Palaeoenvironmental data obtained from coastal areas (wetlands) of southern Nigeria reveal three main periods of climatic changes from the Mid Holocene-Present namely (i) very wet (ca. 6,000-5,000 BP), (ii) dry (ca. 4,500-2,500 BP) and (iii) humid periods (ca. 2,500-Present). This paper explores the dynamic ways in which the culture of plant management and plant food resources in these marginal lands has been expressed within the context of environmental change. The similarities in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Logan.

This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, I weave together archaeological and historical narratives about two plants in West Africa to explore the pitfalls and potentials of multispecies approaches. I argue that in West Africa, both individual plants and climate change have often been accorded more agentive...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gerard Chouin.

The sudden emergence of deadly infectious diseases compels societies to improvise ways to manage the dead, explore causations, and save lives. Such overwhelming demographic events are sources of trauma but also opportunities for individual survivors and for the social fabric as a whole. Sub-Saharan Africa, like many other parts of the Old World where past mass mortalities were not documented, has been omitted from the debate about the impact of pandemics on deep historical trajectories. This...