West African Shores: Ports, infrastructure, and the taskscape of maritime labor

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Port of Call: Archaeologies of Labor and Movement through Ports", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

This presentation compares West African ports and their attendant infrastructure. As Atlantic trade intensified along the West African shore during the 17th and 18th centuries, Europeans relied heavily on local Africans for their seafaring knowledge and for their help in ferrying cargo and captives between ship and shore. In Senegal and Cape Verde, a number of towns became common ports-of-call; however, while the existence of the African port workers is well attested to in the historical record, the structures of the harbor remains to be elucidated, compared to the analyses of contemporaneous harbors in the Americas and Europe. Yet these maritime spaces not only demanded specific types of labor, but also were shaped by the people working in these harbors and shores. Drawing on archival sources and archaeological surveys, this presentation examines the relationship between African labor and the natural and cultural landscapes in which this labor is situated.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023   •
• Port of Call: Archaeologies of Labor and Movement through Ports

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow