Archaeological Approaches to Slavery and Unfree Labour in Africa
Part of: Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)
This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Archaeological Approaches to Slavery and Unfree Labour in Africa," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.
The practice of capturing, exploiting, and trading humans has deep roots in the history of small and large-scale societies across the world, and continues to shape the lives of modern-day peoples. Slavery has been awarded much attention by scholars, and archaeology has played a vital role in highlighting experiences of enslavement. Archaeologists face major challenges however: the material culture of slavery is often ambiguous, leading to a dearth of knowledge about those institutions, places, and people that lack clear written or oral histories. Africa’s complex past has been fundamentally shaped by the capture and trade in enslaved people by both external and internal forces, and slaves would have played a significant role in past societies. Yet that past is most often understood through contexts outside Africa, particularly the New World. This symposium seeks instead to bring together scholars of slavery working across Africa, exploring how the formation of new and different methodologies can be used to investigate the role of unfree labour in the cultural, religious, and economic production of past societies, and how enslaved people negotiated and resisted their unfree status. This provides a comparative framework from which we can discuss archaeologies of slavery both within and beyond Africa.
Other Keywords
Historic •
Slavery •
Survey •
Ethnohistory/History •
Colonialism •
Historical Archaeology •
Underwater Archaeology •
Mortuary Analysis •
Paleoethnobotany •
Rock Art
Geographic Keywords
Africa (Continent) •
Republic of Rwanda (Country) •
Republic of Burundi (Country) •
Republic of Kenya (Country) •
United Republic of Tanzania (Country) •
Republic of Uganda (Country) •
Somalia (Country) •
Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia (Country) •
State of Eritrea (Country) •
Republic of Yemen (Country)
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-9 of 9)
- Documents (9)
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Assessing the Impacts of the Atlantic Slave Trade and American Crops on African Agriculture (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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...
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Becoming Villagers, Becoming Enslavers: Social Change in Bantu-Speaking Early Villages during the Late Holocene Arid Phase (ca. 1200 BCE. – ca. 100 BCE) (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. Recent syntheses incorporating linguistic, archaeological, and paleoclimatic evidence have argued that villages inhabited by Bantu-speaking communities spread from Cameroon to the Lower Congo from about 1200 BCE to 100 BCE. This southward migration was facilitated by an abrupt climatic warming event that expanded...
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Demographic Change and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in West Africa: An Example from the Abomey Plataeu, Bénin (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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...
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Indian Ocean Comparative Dimensions of Slavery: Resistance and Memory from Mauritius (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. The materiality of slavery has received much attention over recent decades. Unequivocally focused on the Atlantic experience, comparative models from the Indian Ocean serve to enrich our understanding of slavery on a global scale. The body of literature on slave artefacts, mortuary practices, and diet highlight the nuances...
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Maritime Archaeology and Slavery in Mauritius: Le Coureur Shipwreck (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. Analyzing slavery through the lens of shipwrecks makes a significant contribution to the understanding of labor migration. However, beyond the labor diaspora, there are social dynamics that can be view through maritime heritage. The ‘vessel’, the ship itself, was a vehicle of culture contact and the study of the artefacts...
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Mauritian Indenture in the Indian Ocean (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. This paper presents a case study of an African/Indian Ocean plantation that focuses on daily lives of indentured laborers during the 19th century. Mauritius’s Bras d’Eau National Park was a sugar estate that functioned from 1786 to 1868. During the 1830s, French colonial landowners shifted from a reliance on enslaved...
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New Neighbors/Nearest Neighbors: Slavery, Displacement, and Belonging Along the West African Coast (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. During the Atlantic Period, Kingdoms along the West African Coast swelled as traders, emissaries, and famers moved to palatial capitals. As these groups freely poured into West African cities, African kings added war captives and enslaved individuals to the urban mix. Elite Africans were reliant on enslaved and attached...
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Runaway Slaves, Rock Art and Resistance in the Cape Colony, South Africa (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. The protracted colonisation of southern Africa's Cape created conditions of extreme prejudice and violence. Like the Caribbean equivalent, however, the Cape conditions presented opportunities for the colonised to escape. Slaves, the unwilling migrants to the Cape comprised of all sorts from the Dutch and British colonies:...
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The Span of ‘Slavery’: Considering Systems of Domination and Labour in the Lake Chad Basin (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. "The kings of the Sudan sell their people for no reason, and quite apart from any wars…" (Ahmad al-Ya’kūbī). The Lake Chad Basin was one of the anchor points of the trans-Saharan slave trade, through the millennium after al-Ya’kūbī wrote about the rulers of Kanem in the 9th century AD. This region had no equivalent to...