Scaling Food Practices: Contextual Comparison of Animal and Plant Remains from Banda, Ghana, during the Early Atlantic Era

Summary

In this paper, we examine food practices in Banda, Ghana, during the tumultuous 15th to 17th centuries AD, as global scale political economic shifts collided with local economies. In Banda, significant involvement in northward-looking Niger trade began to erode as attention shifted towards emerging Atlantic networks. At the same time, paleoenvironmental records indicate a severe, multi-century drought. How did people negotiate these pressures in their everyday food practices? To address this question, we compare faunal and floral remains from four structures and two midden sequences across two major sites in the region – Ngre Kataa and Kuulo Kataa. We turn special attention to patterning at multiple scales – between sites, structures, and middens – to coax out the localized strategies people used to deal with major economic and environmental change.

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