The Landscapes, Memories, and Identities of Atlantic Slavery at Peki, Ghana

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper explores the complex history of Atlantic slavery and European colonization in Peki, a frontier Ewe community in present-day southeastern Ghana. This community played a pivotal role that led the pan-Ewe confederacy– the Krepi– out of Akwamu and Asante domination in the mid-nineteenth century. To consolidate their power, the Peki made two major maneuvers. First, they invited the North German Missionary Society to their community in 1847, with the aim of using them to gain direct access to European merchants on the coast. Second, they established a franchise of the influential Krachi-Dente deity at Peki. The Krachi shrine had controlled the Atlantic slave in the nineteenth century until it was destroyed by German colonial officials in 1894. The Peki shrine also became a major source of Peki’s religious, political, and economic power at the height of post-abolition slavery. This paper draws on archaeological, archival, and ethnographic data to complicate the dichotomy of victims and perpetrators of the Atlantic slave trade in Africa. It highlights the utility of community-engaged and interdisciplinary research in understanding ways that the material remains, memories, and identities of enslavement have been preserved or erased as local values and power dynamics have changed over time.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36181.0