Genealogies of Practice in and of the Environment in Banda, Ghana

Logan, Amanda L.; Stahl, Ann B.

doi:10.1007/s10816-017-9315-5

Cited by 13 publications

(18 citation statements)

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“…In recent work, these counter‐punctual framings in African archaeology focus on the dynamism of daily practice against an imagined sameness and isolation of village life over centuries and indeed millennia (Logan and Stahl ; Richard ). Also prominent is a counter‐punctual reframing of the significance of connections: you imagine Africa as a pliable source of raw materials and indiscriminate consumer of products manufactured elsewhere, but I will show how the circulation of materials and goods across interfaces (of Atlantic Africa, Saharan, or Indian Ocean connections) coproduced lifeways in regions so entangled, so that you understand the agentic role of Africans in the shaping of these broader systems.…”

Section: Sketching the Contours Of Effective Archaeologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Assembling “Effective Archaeologies” toward Equitable Futures

Stahl

2020

American Anthropologist

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An urgency compels us to engage how archaeology relates to contemporary situations and future dilemmas as citizens anxiously contemplate their futures. We see “crowd‐sourced” efforts to define pressing questions. A welter of theoretical approaches promises new insight into our relationally configured worlds. We couple awareness of the situated character of knowledge with a commitment to its empirical grounding. In light of this contemporary frame, I explore principles of an “effective archaeology” that imagines its “impacts” beyond narrow “uses.” By attending to how we make facts, archives, and narratives; by placing Western knowledge in productive dialogue with knowledge grounded in other epistemologies; and by embracing a disciplinary responsibility to expand and enlarge imaginings of futures through evidentially robust and critically engaged practice, effective archaeologies hold promise to build toward more equitable futures. [archaeology, epistemology, ontology, knowledge production, collaboration]

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Section: Sketching the Contours Of Effective Archaeologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Assembling “Effective Archaeologies” toward Equitable Futures

Stahl

2020

American Anthropologist

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“…In Banda, much of our data on daily life before and during the Columbian Exchange comes from two towns we know by their archaeological site names, Ngre Kataa and Kuulo Kataa, named after their proximity to modern-day villages. 3 These are among the largest villages occupied during the early Atlantic era in the Banda area, which we know archaeologically as the mid-to late Kuulo phase (AD 1414-1615), based on distinctive pottery forms and radiocarbon dates (Logan and Stahl 2017;Stahl 1999bStahl , 2001Stahl , 2007. 4 Both sites were occupied over several centuries, with people's repeated activities resulting in contexts accumulating on top of one another, forming low mounds across today's landscape.…”

Section: Fo Odways In C Oastal Ghana In the Early Atl Antic Er Amentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the paragraphs that follow, I attempt to recreate what life might have looked like in this very different version of Banda, following Hegmon and colleagues' (2016) writing conventions, which aim to highlight human experience rather than material remains. For more details on the archaeology of Banda during the mid-to late Kuulo phase, see Stahl's extensive publications (Stahl 1999b(Stahl , 2001(Stahl , 2002(Stahl , 2007(Stahl , 2015(Stahl , 2018a(Stahl , 2018b as well as a more recent consideration of the relationship between environmental change and exploitation of plants and animals (Logan and Stahl 2017). Data tables are available in appendix B.…”

Section: Fo Odways In C Oastal Ghana In the Early Atl Antic Er Amentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Peoples' relationships with animals were quite extensive, and meat was consumed in a quantity unmatched earlier or later in time (Logan and Stahl 2017;Stahl 1999b). The casual visitor would have likely seen plenty of sheep and goats roaming the villages, along with cattle, a great variety of birds, including chickens and guinea fowls, fish, and the occasional pig.…”

Section: Fo Odways In C Oastal Ghana In the Early Atl Antic Er Amentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Scarcity Slot: Excavating Histories of Food Security in Ghana

Logan¹

2020

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The Scarcity Slot is the first book to critically examine food security in Africa’s deep past. Amanda L. Logan argues that African foodways have been viewed through the lens of “the scarcity slot,” a kind of othering based on presumed differences in resources. Weaving together archaeological, historical, and environmental data with food ethnography, she advances a new approach to building long-term histories of food security on the continent in order to combat these stereotypes. Focusing on a case study in Banda, Ghana that spans the past six centuries, The Scarcity Slot reveals that people thrived during a severe, centuries-long drought just as Europeans arrived on the coast, with a major decline in food security emerging only recently. This narrative radically challenges how we think about African foodways in the past, with major implications for the future.

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“…Instead, we have sharpened our methodological tools, especially with archaeobotany and geoarchaeology, to detect droughts and other environmental perturbations. As a result, we have developed great models and interpretation frameworks for understanding the intersections of drought and sociopolitics and vice versa (e.g., Logan and Stahl 2017 ). Both droughts and infectious diseases are products of ecological perturbations, but they cannot be understood outside the sociopolitical and environmental contexts.…”

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confidence: 99%

Managing Epidemics in Ancestral Yorùbá Towns and Cities: “Sacred Groves” as Isolation Sites

Ogundiran

2020

Afr Archaeol Rev

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The COVID-19 pandemic is firing up our imagination about how to account for the past epidemics in archaeological contexts. This essay is a reflection on some of the historical cases of epidemic outbreaks in Yorùbá history, and what we can learn from social memory, oral traditions, and recent eyewitness accounts on how microbial attacks were managed in ancestral Yorùbá urban centers. Malignant microbes usually thrive in the kind of settlement configurations-dense towns and cities-that supported the preferred sociopolitical organization among the Yorùbá for over a millennium. Sacred groves were incorporated into the ancestral Yorùbá urban planning. They served many roles, including as isolation centers for managing epidemic outbreaks. Such isolation sites are difficult to identify in archaeological contexts without the aid of historical sources. However, contemplating how these special spaces were embedded in the past Yorùbá cultural lives could broaden our imagination of social regeneration processes in times of crisis (e.g., infectious disease).

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Genealogies of Practice in and of the Environment in Banda, Ghana

Cited by 13 publications

References 50 publications

Assembling “Effective Archaeologies” toward Equitable Futures

Assembling “Effective Archaeologies” toward Equitable Futures

The Scarcity Slot: Excavating Histories of Food Security in Ghana

Managing Epidemics in Ancestral Yorùbá Towns and Cities: “Sacred Groves” as Isolation Sites

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