Slavery without Slaves: Archaeology of Frederikssted Plantation and Its Implications for Plantation Archaeology in Ghana

Summary

In 1803, Denmark and Norway abolished the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which took effect on 1st January 1803. However, this did not end slavery itself in Africa. Intensification of cash-crop agriculture on the West African coast by the Danish colonists provoked an upsurge in the local slave trade. As the Danish plantation economy solidified, increasing numbers of enslaved people were engaged to labour in these plantations in Ghana. The research examines the documentary and the archaeological data of one of the earliest Danish plantations (Frederikssted plantation) established in 1794 in Dodowa, in Ghana. Frederikssted and other Danish plantations are part of the building blocks of long-term cultural contact spanning almost two centuries (1658-1850) between Denmark and Ghana, and they offer this research the opportunity to gauge the continuities and discontinuities in contemporary. The excavations and the resultant material culture reveal that Frederikssted plantation site represents different episodes of occupation, abandonment, and reoccupation. Indigenous local elites who reoccupied the plantation (after its collapse in 1802) have play a crucial role in shaping the plantation landscape, which provides a new way to understand plantation archaeology in general.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21187