Published In

The African Diaspora Archaeology Network Newsletter

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-1-2008

Subjects

African diaspora, Black people -- Material culture

Abstract

An archaeological project launched as part of Kofi Agorsah’s Fulbright Scholar program at the University of Cape Coast, Ghana in 2007, aimed at investigating the cultural formation and transformation of the historic Kormantse settlement on the Gold Coast, in response to changes occurring through colonial times. It sought to explain, by use of ethnographic and archaeological material, the processes and cultural manifestations by which the settlement’s population, including those who passed through Kormantse during the trans-Atlantic slave trade between the 16th and 20th centuries, negotiated their survival and identities. Preliminary studies in 1999 and 2007 indicate that Kormantse embraced the colonial slave trade and had access to abundant mass-produced local and foreign trade material and culture, while serving as a rallying point and an outlet for both the trans-Saharan and Atlantic trades. Bringing together archaeological assemblage, ethnographic and historical data to depict, explain and represent the numerous African populations identified under varying “Africa-named groups” in the colonial encounter in West Africa and their implications for the New World African cultures was the main challenge of this project.

Specific issues addressed included identifying recognized material traces indicative of internal and external trade contacts and exchanges, migration routes and patterns of market traffic and, ultimately, the different groups represented in the colonial encounter with Kormantse and surrounding areas as the connecting links. It was expected that evidence of changing burial and other social practices as indices of the community’s shifting identity, would help determine how the communities in and around Kormantse adjusted to changing conditions of the colonial encounter. Artifact differentiation and sources of goods and “people,” travel routes, makers and makers’ marks on artifacts and scientific dates were main means of identifying and establishing how they related to emerging and continuing social distinctions within communities in and around Kormantse.

Rights

© The Authors

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/42401

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