Transformation in the Era of the Atlantic World: The Central Region Project, Coastal Ghana

Syracuse University, Syracuse NY

Investigators

Abstract

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Christopher R. DeCorse and graduate students from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University will conduct fieldwork in coastal Ghana over the next four years. The project will examine sociocultural transformations in African societies from about A.D. 500 though the nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on trade, social organization, and technological change during the era of the Atlantic World. Focusing on the archaeological record, the project takes a holistic, interdisciplinary perspective that will integrate documentary sources and oral traditions with data obtained from archaeological sites. Research will examine the growth of the European Atlantic trade and the emergence, expansion, and decline of the African polities that dominated the trade on the Ghanaian coast. While some of these developments are recorded in written records, these accounts were mostly provided by European writers and they provide limited insight into the African societies of the wider hinterland located away from the coastal trading entrepots. The intellectual merit of this project lies in several areas differing in scope and emphasis. Specifically, it will examine the emergence, expansion, and decline of the African polities that dominated the trade though changes in settlement patterning, site densities, and artifact inventories. Site chronologies, and examination of the nature and consequences of economic transformations, will be aided by the study of well-dated trade materials from some of the region's principal European trade ports. Data from European trade posts will also afford insight into lifeways within the small enclaves of European traders that lived on the coast. Although archaeological data on some individual sites are currently available, the project will provide the first comprehensive survey of the region and, indeed, be one of the most comprehensive regional surveys undertaken in Ghana. The information obtained on site distributions, local industries, and trade materials will thus provide a lasting framework for the region's culture history, as well as an understanding of the wider socio-cultural changes of which the region was part. The research project also has broader relevance to archeological method and theory, particularly with regard to the examination of complexity and culture contact in other world areas. Examination of the coastal polities of West Africa will provide insight into the varied nature of complexity and its archaeological perception. In doing so it will help to address broader theoretical concerns regarding the nature of complex societies and the role of long distance trade in state formation. Drawing on more heterarchical models of complexity, the work will illustrate that socio-political formation is not a simple, uniform process, but one that varies greatly depending on local contexts. The survey of terrestrial sites, integrating multiple lines of evidence, has applications in other areas where archaeological survey is hampered by thick vegetation.