Demographic Change and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in West Africa: An Example from the Abomey Plataeu, Bénin

Summary

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 slavery within Africa have emphasized the quintessential value of captives within African political systems based on "wealth-in-people" rather than "wealth-in-goods". These two models are largely incompatible. Indeed, how do we explain the rapid rise in the export of human beings over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, if political authority in this period depended fundamentally on absorbing such captives into extant polities? Recent archaeological survey on the Abomey Plateau, political heartland of the slave trading Kingdom of Dahomey, reveals a period of rapid population growth in the early years of the colonial encounter in the 16th and 17th centuries AD, followed by population decline and settlement nucleation in the 18th Century. This paper outlines this evidence in light of the demographic history of the Slave Coast, and considers an alternative hypothesis for the origins of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in West Africa.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeological Approaches to Slavery and Unfree Labour in Africa   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25849