Towards an Archaeology of Black Atlantic Sovereignty: Materializing Political Agency in the Kingdoms of Dahomey and Haiti

Summary

The Archaeology of the African Diaspora has long privileged the analysis of the everyday lives of enslaved Africans living on plantation sites in the New World. Notwithstanding the political and intellectual importance of this approach to our understanding of the emergence of the colonial world and its contemporary legacies, recent scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic has examined the new political entities that arose across the Black Atlantic World in dynamic tension with broader Atlantic political and economic forces. Such work has highlighted how political authority in emerging Black Atlantic states were materialized at multiple scales of analysis, and in complex relationships with colonial societies. In this paper, drawing from comparative archaeological research on the Kingdom of Dahomey (Bénin) and the Kingdom of Haiti (Haiti), I will explore the potential for an archaeology of sovereignty in the Black Atlantic World. Emphasizing the economic and symbolic nature of both architectural spaces and artifacts recovered from the homes of monarchs in these two polities, this paper reveals the complex ways sovereign states were articulated into the broader economic and political currents of the Atlantic World, casting new light on the problematic nature of political sovereignty in the Age of Revolutions.

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): 22718