Situated along the "Slave Coast" of West Africa, the international coastal trading entrepôt of Ouidah is infamous as the point of embarkation for hundreds of thousands of people spirited into the Middle Passage. Accordingly, scholars have looked to it and the surrounding region as a font of culture and history for diasporic groups. In scholarly narratives, the larger Gbe-speaking region surrounding Ouidah is characterized as the homeland of Vodun, a religious tradition that influenced diasporic religions throughout the Atlantic world. This paper explores early Huedan Vodun at a local level and works to bolster, and at the same time problematize, the project of addressing Vodun at increasing geographic scales and temporal depths. It builds on longstanding research which recognizes that context is critical for interpreting possible ritual or religious significance of archaeological material.
Anthropologists and archaeologists have long been interested in the intersection of social, political, and religious institutions and landscape features. Recent efforts have been aimed at elucidating the tensions between the perception and description of such features among Western and non‐Western groups. This article seeks to contribute to this project through an analysis of a series of massive ditches (c. 17th–19th centuries A.D.) in southern Bénin, West Africa. In their accounts of the region, European travelers described these features through tropes and terminology that ascribe Western military designs and exploits. With insights drawn from archaeological and anthropological data, we argue a different perspective: that groups from the West African kingdoms of Hueda and Dahomey used the built landscape to reference cosmological factors, in attempts to negotiate and shape the political landscape of the region.
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