New Neighbors/Nearest Neighbors: Slavery, Displacement, and Belonging Along the West African Coast

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.

During the Atlantic Period, Kingdoms along the West African Coast swelled as traders, emissaries, and famers moved to palatial capitals. As these groups freely poured into West African cities, African kings added war captives and enslaved individuals to the urban mix. Elite Africans were reliant on enslaved and attached labor for monumental construction efforts, agricultural efforts, and sustained regional warfare. This paper considers settlement data from the Hueda Kinddom (ca. 1650-1727 AD) that speaks to such a rapid urban expansion associated with the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. It uses ethnoarchaeological evidences to interpret the uneven and nonsequential nature of Huedan settlement system. It argues that some of the latest settlement in the kingdom was at the center of the settlement system and it considers this unusual settlement pattern in terms of the reliance on enslaved labor and belonging to a place.

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): 25505