Arboreal Historical Anchors: Sacred Forests and Memory Making in Southern Benin, West Africa
Author(s): Neil Norman
Year: 2013
Summary
The Bight of Benin region is well known as a locale filled with poignant places associated with the trans-Atlantic trade in enslaved individuals. This paper follows recent efforts in the region aimed at writing landscape features into deeper historic narratives and exploring them in terms of broader political and economic processes. In so doing, it pushes beyond coastal points of loss and into dynamic cosmopolitan interior places. It argues that the historical and archaeological arc of Atlantic Africa must be understood alongside oral histories anchored to individual trees and larger sacred forests, which are heavily imbricated in memory work and place making.
Cite this Record
Arboreal Historical Anchors: Sacred Forests and Memory Making in Southern Benin, West Africa. Neil Norman. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, Leicester, England, U.K. 2013 ( tDAR id: 428420)
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Keywords
General
Bight of Benin
•
Memory Work
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Placemaking
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Sacred Forests
Geographic Keywords
North America
•
United States of America
Temporal Keywords
17th through 20th Centuries
Spatial Coverage
min long: -129.199; min lat: 24.495 ; max long: -66.973; max lat: 49.359 ;
Individual & Institutional Roles
Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology
Record Identifiers
PaperId(s): 697