West Africa (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leah A. Stricker.

As a result of more than 60 years of archaeobotanical research, West Africa is recognized as an important independent centre of crop domestication, and archaeobotany has shed light on the connection between the crops and foodways of West Africa and those of the American south. But much remains unknown of the history of timing and processes of West African crop domestication, and food production and processing within this ethnically and environmentally diverse region. Formerly part of the greater...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Fenn.

This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the commodities heading south across the Saharan Desert over the past 2000+ years was glass. The typical form was as beads, but vessel glass and other forms also have been recorded. Glass not only was imported but at some point in the past also was produced by indigenous populations for local and regional consumption. Advances in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cameron Gokee.

Over the past century, archaeological reconnaissance and survey in the Senegambia region of West Africa has identified more than 2000 megalithic cemetery sites dating to the Iron Age (circa 500 BC – AD 1500). Although a number of research programs have explored the histories of individual sites, it remains unclear how these related to one another within a regional tradition of mortuary practice and monument construction. This paper begins to address this issue through integrated geospatial and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Womack. Peter Coutros. Mamadou Cissé.

In the spring of 2017 geophysical remote sensing surveys were conducted across three locations at and around the Dakajalan sacred site, Commune Rurale de Sanankoroba, Mali in order to detect anomalies associated with archaeological features. This site has been described in oral tradition as the location where the battle that proceeded the formation of the Mali Empire took place, and also where the village that acted as the first capital of the newly formed empire was located. Surface survey of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Trenton Zylstra. Kelsey Rooney.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Maritime Archaeology in West Africa", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In the late 1960s, a British “adventurer” purchased a small fishing boat from Senegal, used it to build a catamaran, and then sailed across the Atlantic to the US. This presentation studies the original construction of the dugout canoe, known colloquially in Senegal as a pirogue. This term, broadly applied to numerous local, vernacular...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Neil Norman.

This is an abstract from the "Crafting Archaeological Practice in Africa and Beyond: Celebrating the Contributions of Ann B. Stahl to Global Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Through a series of publications, boots on the ground fieldwork, and dynamic community collaboration, Ann Stahl set the pace for an engaged archaeology that centered historical processes, daily practices, scale, and dimensions of time. Although these theoretical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Coutros. Jessamy Doman.

The first millennium BC was a time of considerable social, technological, and environmental change for the peoples of West Africa. Despite the growing number and distribution of archaeological projects throughout the region, very little is known about this critical period. Likewise, many of the climate models currently in use lack the sufficient temporal or spatial resolution needed to provide context for the variety of changes occurring at a localized level. Recent research at the Diallowali...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cameron Gokee. Matthew Kroot.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean H. Reid. Oluseyi O. Agbelusi. Samuel Amartey. Francis M. Momoh.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Maritime Archeology of the Slave Trade: Past and Present Work, and Future Prospects", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper will assess the current state of the maritime and cultural landscapes of the region from a historical archaeological perspective and highlight their potential for present and future research. It centers on the spatial and material practices on Bunce Island and related trade sites in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Annegers.

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DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelsey Rooney.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Port of Call: Archaeologies of Labor and Movement through Ports", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This presentation compares West African ports and their attendant infrastructure. As Atlantic trade intensified along the West African shore during the 17th and 18th centuries, Europeans relied heavily on local Africans for their seafaring knowledge and for their help in ferrying cargo and captives between ship...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Monroe.

Scholars have long argued that sub-Saharan Africa in the era of the slave trade was dominated by ethnically distinct communities whose members underwent the process of creolization after being displaced to the New World. Archaeological research across West Africa, however, is challenging this notion, revealing how West African cultural identity transformed in response to intersecting economic, political, and cultural forces unleashed by trans-Atlantic commerce.  This paper examines the political...