Slavery in Africa: Archaeology and Memory(168 Proceedings of the British Academy)

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.

Table of Contents:
1: Paul Lane: Introduction: Slavery, Social Revolutions, and Enduring Memories Section 1: Slave Systems of Production in the African Interior: case studies from the Sudanic Belt 2: Kevin MacDonal: Warfare, Captives and the Foundations of the Segou State 3: Moussa Sow: Memories of Slavery in Kaarta, Mali 4: Anne Haour: The Medieval Slave Trade of the Central Sahel: Archaeological and Historical Considerations 5: David Edwards: Slavery and Slaving in the Medieval and Post-Medieval Kingdoms of the Middle Nile. 6: Scott MacEachem: Enslavement and Everyday Life: Living with Slave Raiding in the Northeastern Mandara Mountains of Cameroon Section 2: Archaeological Dimensions of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Evidence from Africa and the Middle Passage 7: Ken Kelly: Archaeological Perspectives on the Atlantic Slave Trade: Contrasts in Time and Space in Bénin and Guinea 8: Ibrahima Thiaw: Slaves Without Shackles: An Archaeology of Everyday Life on Gorée Island, Senegal 9: Natalie Swanepoel: Different Conversations About the Same Thing? Source Materials in the Recreation of a Nineteenth-Century, Slave-Raiding Landscape, Northern Ghana 10: Kofi Agorsah: Archaeological Perspectives on Colonial Slavery: Placing Africa in the African Diaspora Studies in the Caribbean Section 3: Elusive Slavery: Detecting Enslavement in the Archaeological Record of Eastern Africa 11: Niall Finneran: The Invisible Archaeology of Slavery in the Horn of Africa? 12: Alfredo Gonzalez-Ruibal: Monuments of Predation: Turco-Egyptian Forts in Western Ethiopia 13: Paul Lane: Slavery and Slave Trading in Eastern Africa: Exploring the Intersections of Historical Sources and Archaeological Evidence. Section 4: Remembering Slavery: Contemporary Perceptions 14: Stephanie Wynn-Jones: Recovering and Remembering a Slave Route in Central Tanzania 15: Jan-Georg Deutsch: Memory, Oral History and the End of Slavery in Tanzania: Some Methodological Considerations 16: Roger Blench: The Present in the Past: How Narratives of the Slave-Raiding Era Inform Current Politics in Northern and Central Nigeria 17: Antonia Malan & Nigel Worden: Constructing and Contesting Histories of Slavery at the Cape, South Africa 18: Chris Evans, Marie Louise Stig Sorensen and Konstantin Richter: Place of History: Archaeology and Heritage at Cidade Velha, Cape Verde

About the Author :
Paul Lane is Senior Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of York. Kevin C. MacDonald is Reader in African Archaeology at University College London.

Review :
in Africa thus stands as a major addition to the literature on the archaeology of Africaâs recent past, and will find a welcomehomeon the bookshelves of students of African history and comparative slavery alike.