Archaeology, Indigenous Archiving Practices, and the African Past: Researching the History of Atlantic Slavery in Peki, Ghana

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Crafting Archaeological Practice in Africa and Beyond: Celebrating the Contributions of Ann B. Stahl to Global Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper discusses the creative use of indigenous and conventional archives and archaeological data in unearthing the history of Atlantic slavery in Peki. This frontier Ewe community in present-day Ghana led the pan-Ewe Krepi state out of Akwamu and Asante hegemony, thereby altering the power dynamics of the 19th-century post-abolition Atlantic economy in the Gold Coast. Researching this complex history from an interdisciplinary perspective that draws data from egalitarian archival sources underscores the fact that non-literate societies have very sophisticated ways of preserving their histories and memories or that there are more “documents” or “archives” than we think—cultural landscapes, ritual practices, and monuments. I argue that African historical archaeologists should pay attention to the dialectics between indigenous archiving practices, oral traditions, and textual archives of the recent African past. Bridging egalitarian and conventional archives in African historical archaeologies is valuable for producing counternarratives that confront biases toward the Western documentary record and how they have been reified through ideological models of social evolution. This approach, however, requires cultural sensitivity and a commitment to collaborative community-engaged research that entails learning with Indigenous communities rather than only learning about them—essential tenets long championed in Ghanaian/West African archaeology by Professor Ann Stahl.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Crafting Archaeological Practice in Africa and Beyond: Celebrating the Contributions of Ann B. Stahl to Global Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39851.0