Bottle Reuse in the Kingdom of Dahomey

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The kingdom of Dahomey, active in what is now the republic of Bénin in seventeenth through nineteenth century West Africa, was a rich and complex society governed by a royal palace (Monroe 2014). In 2000, excavations that began at the kingdom’s royal palace complexes as a part of the Abomey Plateau Archaeological Project revealed a complex state driven by militarized expansion and trade (Monroe 2014). The pre-industrial reuse of glass bottles provides insight into the different roles played by these vessels through the analysis of use-wear. In this paper, I analyze the use of glass bottles at Dahomey to determine how they may have been re-used. In the analysis I argue that the finish, or the apex of a bottle may be more useful than the base for recording and analyzing use-wear in Dahomey as a result of spiritual and religious practices that may have led to alternate uses.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow