Research Catalog

Title

Slavery in Africa : archaeology and memory / edited by Paul J. Lane and Kevin C. MacDonald.

Publication

Oxford ; New York : Published for the British Academy by Oxford University Press, 2011.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

• Lane, Paul (Paul J.)
• MacDonald, Kevin C.
• British Academy.

Description

xv, 468 pages : illustrations, maps; 24 cm.

Summary

The role and consequences of slavery in the history of Africa have been brought to the fore recently in historical, anthropological and archaeological research. Public remembrances - such as Abolition 2007 in Great Britain, which marked the bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act and which this volume also commemorates - have also stimulated considerable interest. There is a growing realisation that enslavement, whether as part of a sliding scale of 'rights in persons' or due to acts of violence, has a history on the African continent that extends back in time long before the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. The nature of such enslavement is obscured by the lack of resolution in historical sources before the middle of the second millennium AD. Ground-breaking archaeological research is now building models for approaching slave labour systems via collaboration with historians and the critical scrutiny of historical data. Generally, such new research focuses at the landscape scale; rather than attempting to find physical evidence of slavery per se, it assesses the settlement systems of slavery-based economies, and the depopulation and abandonment which followed from wars of enslavement. The potential utility of this work is considerable, and is ultimately the only means whereby researchers will be able to resolve the many 'chicken-or-egg' issues which beset the historical study of slavery in Africa. Recent decades have also witnessed an increase in attempts to commemorate and memorialise slavery on the African continent, through a combination of museum displays, historic site interpretation and public history projects. Unfortunately, there are still very few critical discussions of relevant case studies of this kind of public archaeology across the continent, and few examples of good practice. This volume addresses this lack by offering a selection of papers on recent archaeological studies of slavery, slave resistance and their contemporary commemoration, alongside archaeological assessments of the economic, environmental and political consequences of slave trading in a variety of historical and geographical settings.

Series Statement

Proceedings of the British Academy ; 168

Uniform Title

Proceedings of the British Academy ; 168.

Subject

• Slavery > Africa > History
• Slave rebellions > Africa > History
• Slave trade > Africa > History
• Slave trade > Political aspects > History. > Africa
• Slave trade > Economic aspects > History. > Africa
• Slave trade > Environmental aspects > History. > Africa
• Slave insurrections
• Slave trade
• Slavery
• Archäologie
• Sklavenhandel
• Sklaverei
• Slaveri > historia > Afrika
• Slavhandel > historia > Afrika
• Slavuppror > historia > Afrika
• Sklaverei
• Sklavenhandel
• Africa
• Afrika
• Afrika

Genre/Form

History.

Note

• Based on the symposium: Archaeological and historical dimensions of slavery in East and West Africa in comparative perspective, held Mar. 24-25, 2007.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Introduction: Slavery, social revolutions and enduring memories / Paul J. Lane and Kevin C. MacDonald -- Part I Slave systems of production in the African interior: case studies from the Sudanic belt -- Segou: warfare and the origins of a state of slavery / Kevin C. MacDonald and Seydou Camara -- The daily life of slaves in the last years of the Bamana States of Kaarta and Segou / Moussa Sow -- The Early Medieval slave trade of the Central Sahel: archaeological and historical considerations / Anne Haour -- Slavery and slaving in the Medieval and Post-Medieval Kingdoms of the Middle Nile / David N. Edwards -- Enslavement and everyday life: living with slave raiding in the North-Eastern Mandara Mountains of Cameroon / Scott MacEachern -- Part II Archaeological dimensions of the Atlantic slave trade: evidence from Africa and the diaspora -- Archaeological perspectives on the Atlantic slave trade: contrasts in time and space in Benin and Guinea / Kenneth G. Kelly -- Slaves without shackles: an archaeology of everyday life on Gorée Island, Senegal / Ibrahima Thiaw -- Different conversations about the same thing? Source materials in the recreation of a nineteenth-century slave-raiding landscape, Northen Ghana / Natalie Swanepoel -- Archaeological perspectives on Colonial slavery: placing Africa in African diaspora studies in the Caribbean / E. Kofi Agorsah -- Part III Elusive slavery: detecting enslavement in the archaeological record of Eastern Africa -- The invisible archaeology of slavery in the Horn of Africa? / Niall Finneran -- Monuments of predation: Turco-Egyptian forts in Western Ethiopia / Alfredo González-Ruibal -- Slavery and slave trading in Eastern Africa: exploring the intersections of historical sources and archaeological evidence / Paul J. Lane -- Part IV Remembering slavery: contemporary perceptions -- Recovering and remembering a slave route in Central Tanzania / Stephanie Wynne-Jones -- Memory, oral history and the end of slavery in Tanzania: some methodological considerations / Jan-Georg Deutsch -- The present in the past: how narratives of the slave-raiding era inform current politics in Northern and Central Nigeria / Roger Blench -- Constructing and contesting histories of slavery at the Cape, South Africa / Antonia Malan and Nigel Worden -- A place of history: archaeology and heritage at Cidade Velha, Cape Verde / Marie Louise Stig Sørensen, Christopher Evans and Konstantin Richter.

ISBN

• 9780197264782
• 0197264786

LCCN

2011501179

OCLC

• ocn742511967
• 742511967
• SCSB-1619245

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library