Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Recent Approaches to the Archaeological Investigation of Slavery in Africa

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
The Archaeology of Slavery in Early Medieval Northern Europe

Part of the book series: Themes in Contemporary Archaeology ((TCA))

Abstract

Much of the research on slavery in Africa still relies heavily on documentary and oral sources and uses archaeology more as a means to materialize the practices of slave trading and ownership than as an independent source of evidence. This is perhaps understandable given that their marginal status generally meant enslaved persons left far fewer material traces of their presence than other labour categories. Moreover, even where material evidence has been interpreted as indicative of either slave trading or slave ownership, alternative explanations can usually also be forwarded. In the absence of supporting documentary evidence, verification of the presence of slaves, therefore, may be hard to achieve. Nonetheless, as recent studies now demonstrate, new information about the lives of enslaved individuals, the wider impacts of slave raiding and the organization of slave trading can be gleaned from analysis of material and bioarchaeological evidence at multiple spatial scales, and when several different material and landscape indicators occur together convincing arguments for the presence of slavery can be made. The aim of this chapter is to review these emerging approaches to highlight their possible relevance for the study of slavery systems in other contexts.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 129.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 169.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 169.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  • Alexander, J. (2001). Islam, archaeology and slavery in Africa. World Archaeology, 33(1), 44–60.

    Google Scholar 

  • Allen, R. B. (2015). European slave trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850. Athens: Ohio University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Alpers, E. A. (2005). Mozambique and “Mozambiques”: Slave trade and diaspora on a global scale. In B. Zimba, E. A. Alpers, & A. Isaacman (Eds.), Slave routes and oral tradition in southeastern Africa (pp. 39–61). Maputo: Filsom.

    Google Scholar 

  • Anshan, L. (2012). A history of overseas Chinese in Africa to 1911. New York: Diasporic Africa Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bakir, A. e.-M. (1952). Slavery in pharaonic Egypt (Supplément aux Annales du Service des Antiquités de l’Egypte, 18). Cairo: Organisation égyptienne générale du livre.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bankoff, H. A., & Winter, F. A. (2005). The archaeology of slavery at the Van Cortlandt plantation in the Bronx, New York. International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 9(4), 291–318.

    Google Scholar 

  • Barrett, A. R., & Blakey, M. L. (2011). Life histories of enslaved Africans in colonial New York. In S. A. Agarwal & B. A. Glencross (Eds.), Social bioarchaeology (pp. 212–251). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bastos, M. Q., Santos, R. V., de Souza, S. M., Rodrigues-Carvalho, C., Tykot, R. H., Cook, D. C., & Santos, R. V. (2016). Isotopic study of geographic origins and diet of enslaved Africans buried in two Brazilian cemeteries. Journal of Archaeological Science, 70, 82–90.

    Google Scholar 

  • Beachey, R. W. (1976). A collection of documents on the slave trade of eastern Africa. London: Rex Collings.

    Google Scholar 

  • Botte, R. (2011). Les réseaux transsahariens de la traite de l’or et des esclaves au haut Moyen Âge: VIIIe–XIe siècle. L’Année du Maghreb, 7, 27–59.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bredwa-Mensah, Y. (2004). Global encounters: Slavery and slave lifeways on nineteenth century Danish plantations on the Gold Coast, Ghana. Journal of African Archaeology, 2(2), 203–227.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bredwa-Mensah, Y. (2008). Slavery and resistance on nineteenth century Danish plantations in southeastern Gold Coast, Ghana. African Studies Monographs, 29(3), 133–145.

    Google Scholar 

  • Burnard, T. (2011). The Atlantic slave trade. In G. Heuman & T. Burnard (Eds.), The Routledge history of slavery (pp. 80–98). Abingdon: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cadenas, A. M., Zhivotovsky, L. A., Cavalli-Sforza, L. L., Underhill, P. A., & Herrera, R. J. (2008). Y-chromosome diversity characterizes the Gulf of Oman. European Journal of Human Genetics, 16(3), 374–386.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cameron, C. M. (Ed.). (2008). Invisible citizens: Captives and their consequences. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Campbell, G. (Ed.). (2004a). Structure of slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia. London: Frank Cass.

    Google Scholar 

  • Campbell, G. (2004b). Slavery and other forms of unfree labour in the Indian Ocean world. In G. Campbell (Ed.), Structure of slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (pp. vii–xxxii). London: Frank Cass.

    Google Scholar 

  • Campbell, G. (2007). Slavery and the trans-Indian Ocean world slave trade: A historical outline. In E. Alpers & H. Ray (Eds.), Cross currents and community networks: The history of the Indian Ocean world (pp. 273–291). New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Carney, J. A. (2001). Black rice: The African origins of rice cultivation in the Americas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Carney, J. A., & Rosomoff, R. N. (2011). In the shadow of slavery: Africa’s botanical legacy in the Atlantic world. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Clarence-Smith, W. (2006). Islam and the abolition of slavery. London: Hurst & Company.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cooper, F. (1977). Plantation slavery on the East Coast of Africa. New Haven: Yale University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cox, G., & Sealy, J. (1997). Investigating identity and life histories: Isotopic analysis and historical documentation of slave skeletons found on the Cape Town foreshore, South Africa. International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 1(3), 207–224.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cox, G., Sealy, J., Schrire, C., & Morris, A. (2001). Stable carbon and nitrogen isotopic analyses of the underclass at the colonial Cape of Good Hope in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. World Archaeology, 33, 73–97.

    Google Scholar 

  • Croucher, S. (2014). Capitalism and cloves: An archaeology of plantation life on nineteenth-century Zanzibar. New York: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Davis, R. C. (2004). Christian slaves, Muslim masters: White slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • DeCorse, C. R. (1992). Culture contact, continuity, and change on the Gold Coast, ad 1400–1900. African Archaeological Review, 10, 159–192.

    Google Scholar 

  • DeCorse, C. R. (2001a). An archaeology of Elmina: Africans and Europeans on the Gold Coast, 1400–1900. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • DeCorse, C. R. (Ed.). (2001b). West Africa during the Atlantic stave trade: Archaeological perspectives. London: Leicester University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Edwards, D. N. (2011). Slavery and slaving in the medieval and post-medieval kingdoms of the Middle Nile. In Lane & MacDonald, 2011b, pp. 79–108.

    Google Scholar 

  • Eltis, D., & Engerman, S. L. (2015). Dependence, servility, and coerced labor in time and space. In D. Eltis & S. L. Engerman (Eds.), The Cambridge world history of slavery (Vol. 3: ad 1420–ad 1804, pp. 1–21). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ferguson, L. (1992). Uncommon ground: Archaeology and early African America, 1650–1800. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.

    Google Scholar 

  • Finch, J. (2016). Atlantic landscapes: Connecting place and people in the modern world. Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage, 4(3), 195–213.

    Google Scholar 

  • Finnegan, E., Hart, T., & Halkett, D. (2011). The ‘informal’ burial ground at Prestwich Street, Cape Town: Cultural and chronological indicators for the historical cape underclass. South African Archaeological Bulletin, 66(194), 136–148.

    Google Scholar 

  • Finneran, N. (2011). The invisible archaeology of slavery in the horn of Africa? In Lane & MacDonald, 2011b, pp. 225–249.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fisher, A. G. B., & Fisher, H. J. (1970). Slavery and Muslim society in Africa: The institution in Saharan and Sudanic Africa and the trans-Saharan trade. London: C. Hurst.

    Google Scholar 

  • Funari, P. P. A., & Orser, C. E. (Eds.). (2015). Current perspectives on the archaeology of African slavery in Latin America. New York: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gijanto, L., & Walshaw, S. (2014). Ceramic production and dietary changes at Juffure, Gambia. African Archaeological Review, 31(2), 265–297.

    Google Scholar 

  • González-Ruibal, A. (2011). Monuments of predation: Turco-Egyptian forts in Western Ethiopia. In Lane & MacDonald, 2011b, pp. 251–279.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gronenborn, D. (2001). Kanem-Borno: A brief summary of the history and archaeology of an empire of the central bilad al-sudan. In C. R. DeCorse (Ed.), West Africa during the Atlantic stave trade: Archaeological perspectives (pp. 101–130). London: Leicester University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Handler, J. S., & Lange, F. W. (1978). Plantation slavery in Barbados: An archaeological and historical investigation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Handler, J. S., & Lange, F. W. (2006). On interpreting slave status from archaeological remains. The African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter June 2006. http://www.diaspora.illinois.edu/news0606/news0606.html#1

  • Haour, A. 2011. The early medieval slave trade of the Central Sahel: Archaeological and historical considerations. In Lane & MacDonald, 2011b, pp. 61–78.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hayes, K. H. (2013). Slavery before race: Europeans, Africans, and Indians at Long Island’s Sylvester manor plantation, 1651–1884. New York: New York University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jordan, E. G. (2005). ‘Unrelenting toil’: Expanding archaeological interpretations of the female slave experience. Slavery and Abolition, 26, 217–232.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kelly, K. G. (1997). The archaeology of African–European interaction: Investigating the social roles of trade, traders, and the use of space in the seventeenth and eighteenth century Hueda kingdom, Republic of Benin. World Archaeology, 28(3), 77–95.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kelly, K. G. (2011). Archaeological perspectives on the Atlantic slave trade: Contrasts in time and space in Benin and Guinea. In Lane & MacDonald, 2011b, pp. 127–146.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kusimba, C. M. (2004). Archaeology of slavery in East Africa. African Archaeological Review, 21(2), 59–88.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kusimba, C. M. (2014). The impact of slavery on the East African political economy and gender relationships. In Marshall, 2014a, pp. 230–254.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lane, P. J. (2011). Slavery and slave trading in Eastern Africa: Exploring the intersections of historical sources and archaeological evidence. In Lane & MacDonald, 2011b, pp. 281–314.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lane, P. J., & Johnson, D. (2008). The archaeology and history of slavery in South Sudan in the 19th century. In A. C. A. Peacock (Ed.), The frontiers of the Ottoman world (pp. 509–537). London: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lane, P. J., & MacDonald, K. (2011a). Introduction: Slavery, social revolutions, and enduring memories. In Lane & MacDonald, 2011b, pp. 1–22.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lane, P. J., & MacDonald, K. (Eds.). (2011b). Slavery in Africa: Archaeology and memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lange, D., & Berthoud, S. (1977). Al-Qasaba et d’autres villes de la route centrale du Sahara. Paideuma, 23, 181–200.

    Google Scholar 

  • Leone, M., & Tang, A. (2014). Definitions in historical archaeology: Enslaved African Americans cultivating a scientific garden, Wye House, Maryland, USA. In J. Symonds & V.-P. Herva (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of historical archaeology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199562350.013.29.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Lightfoot, D. R., & Miller, J. A. (1996). Sijilmassa: The rise and fall of a walled oasis in medieval Morocco. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 86(1), 78–101.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lightfoot, E., Čaval, S., Calaon, D., Appleby, J., Santana, J., Cianciosi, A., Fregel, R., & Seetah, K. (2020). Colonialism, slavery and ‘the great experiment’: Carbon, nitrogen and oxygen isotope analysis of Le Morne and Bois Marchand cemeteries, Mauritius. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 31, 102335.

    Google Scholar 

  • Loprieno, A. (2012). Slavery and servitude. In J. Dieleman, E. Frood, & W. Wendrich (Eds.), UCLA encyclopedia of Egyptology. Los Angeles: University of California. Available at: http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/viewItem.do?ark=21198/zz002djg3j

  • Lovejoy, P. E. (2011). Transformations in slavery: A history of slavery in Africa (3rd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lucas, G. (2004). An archaeology of colonial identity: Power and material culture in the Dwars Valley, South Africa. New York: Kluwer.

    Google Scholar 

  • MacDonald, K. C., & Camara, S. (2011). Segou: Warfare and the origins of a state of slavery. In Lane & MacDonald, 2011b, pp. 25–46.

    Google Scholar 

  • MacEachern, S. (2001). State formation and enslavement in the southern Lake Chad Basin. In C. DeCorse (Ed.), West Africa during the Atlantic stave trade: Archaeological perspectives (pp. 131–151). London: Leicester University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • MacEachern, S. (2011). Enslavement and everyday life: Living with slave raiding in the North-Eastern Mandara Mountains of Cameroon. In Lane & MacDonald, 2011b, pp. 109–124.

    Google Scholar 

  • Malan, A., & Worden, G.. (2011). Constructing and contesting histories of slavery at the Cape, South Africa. In Lane & MacDonald, 2011b, pp. 393–419.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mapunda, B. B. (2017). Encounter with “an injured buffalo”: Slavery and colonial emancipation in Tanzania. Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage, 6(1), 1–18.

    Google Scholar 

  • Markell, A., Hall, M., & Schrire, C. (1995). The historical archaeology of Vergelegen, an early farmstead at the Cape of Good Hope. Historical Archaeology, 29, 10–34.

    Google Scholar 

  • Marmon, S. (1999). Domestic slavery in the Mamluk empire: A preliminary sketch. In S. E. Marmon (Ed.), Slavery in the Islamic middle east (pp. 1–23). Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers.

    Google Scholar 

  • Marshall, L. W. (2012). Spatiality and the interpretation of identity formation: Fugitive slave community creation in nineteenth-century Kenya. African Archaeological Review, 29(4), 355–381.

    Google Scholar 

  • Marshall, L. W. (Ed.). (2014a). The archaeology of slavery: A comparative approach to captivity and coercion. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Marshall, L. W. (2014b). Introduction: The comparative archaeology of slavery. In Marshall, 2014a, pp. 1–23.

    Google Scholar 

  • Marshall, L. W. (2014c). Marronage and the politics of memory: Fugitive slaves, interaction, and integration in nineteenth-century Kenya. In Marshall, 2014a, pp. 276–299.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mattingly, D. J., Sterry, M. J., & Edwards, D. N. (2015). The origins and development of Zuwīla, Libyan Sahara: An archaeological and historical overview of an ancient Oasis Town and Caravan Centre. Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa, 50(1), 27–75.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mbeki, L., Kootker, L. M., Kars, H., & Davies, G. R. (2017). Sickly slaves, soldiers and sailors. Contextualising the Cape’s 18th–19th century green point burials through isotope investigation. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 11, 480–490.

    Google Scholar 

  • McIntosh, S. K. (2001). Tools for understanding transformation and continuity in Senegambian Society: 1500–1900. In C. R. DeCorse (Ed.), West Africa during the Atlantic stave trade: Archaeological perspectives (pp. 14–37). London: Leicester University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Médard, H., & Doyle, S. (Eds.). (2007). Slavery in the Great Lakes region of Africa. Oxford: James Currey.

    Google Scholar 

  • Médard, H., Derat, M.-L., Vernet, T., & Ballarin, M. P. (Eds.). (2013). Traites et esclavages en Afrique orientale et dans l’océan Indien. Paris: Karthala.

    Google Scholar 

  • Meskell, L. (1998). An archaeology of social relations in an Egyptian Village. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 5(3), 209–243.

    Google Scholar 

  • Meskell, L. (2002). The intersections of identity and politics in archaeology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 31, 279–301.

    Google Scholar 

  • Miers, S. (2003). Slavery: A question of definition. Slavery and Abolition, 24(2), 1–16.

    Google Scholar 

  • Miers, S., & Kopytoff, I. (Eds.). (1977). Slavery in Africa: Historical and anthropological perspectives. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Monroe, J. C. (2007). Continuity, revolution or evolution on the slave coast of West Africa? Royal architecture and political order in precolonial Dahomey. The Journal of African History, 48(3), 349–373.

    Google Scholar 

  • Monroe, J. C. (2010). Power by design: Architecture and politics in precolonial Dahomey. Journal of Social Archaeology, 10(3), 367–397.

    Google Scholar 

  • Norman, N. L. (2009). Hueda (Whydah) country and town: Archaeological perspectives on the rise and collapse of an African Atlantic kingdom. International Journal of African Historical Studies, 42(3), 387–410.

    Google Scholar 

  • Orser, C. E. (1994). The archaeology of African-American slave religion in the Antebellum South. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 4(1), 33–45.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pearson, A., Jeffs, B., Annsofie, W., & MacQuarrie, H. (2011). Infernal traffic: Excavation of a liberated African graveyard in Rupert’s Valley, St. Helena. York: Council for British Archaeology.

    Google Scholar 

  • Raffield, B. (2019). The slave markets of the Viking world: Comparative perspectives on an ‘invisible archaeology’. Slavery & Abolition, 40(4), 682–705.

    Google Scholar 

  • Richard, F. G. (2013). Thinking through “vernacular cosmopolitanisms”: Historical archaeology in Senegal and the material contours of the African Atlantic. International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 17(1), 40–71.

    Google Scholar 

  • Robertshaw, P., & Duncan, W. L. (2008). African slavery: Archaeology and decentralized societies. In C. M. Cameron (Ed.), Invisible citizens: Captives and their consequences (pp. 57–79). Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Santana, J., Fregel, R., Lightfoot, E., Morales, J., Alamón, M., Guillén, J., Moreno, M., & Rodríguez, A. (2016). The early colonial Atlantic world: New insights on the African diaspora from isotopic and ancient DNA analyses of a multiethnic 15th–17th century burial population from the Canary Islands, Spain. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 159(2), 300–312.

    Google Scholar 

  • Savage, E. (Ed.). (1992). The human commodity: Perspectives on the trans-Saharan slave trade. London: Frank Cass.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schroeder, H., O’Connell, T. C., Evans, J. A., Shuler, K. A., & Hedges, R. E. (2009). Trans-Atlantic slavery: Isotopic evidence for forced migration to Barbados. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 139, 547–557.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schroeder, H., Haviser, J. B., & Price, T. D. (2014). The Zoutsteeg three: Three new cases of African types of dental modification from Saint Martin, Dutch Caribbean. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, 24(6), 688–696.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schroeder, H., Ávila-Arcos, M. C., Malaspinas, A.-S., Poznik, G. D., Sandoval-Velasco, M., Carpenter, M. L., Gilbert, M. T. P., et al. (2015). Genome-wide ancestry of 17th-century enslaved Africans from the Caribbean. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(12), 3669–3673.

    Google Scholar 

  • Scott, J. C. (1990). Domination and the arts of resistance: Hidden transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sealy, J. C., Morris, A. G., Armstrong, R., Markell, A., & Schrire, C. (1993). An historic skeleton from the slave lodge of Vergelegen. In M. Hall & A. Markell (Eds.), Historical archaeology in the Western cape (Goodwin series 7) (pp. 84–91). Johannesburg: South African Archaeological Society.

    Google Scholar 

  • Seetah, K. (2015). Objects past, objects present: Materials, resistance and memory from the Le Morne old cemetery, Mauritius. Journal of Social Archaeology, 15(2), 233–253.

    Google Scholar 

  • Shaw, G. J. (2012). Slavery, pharaonic Egypt. In R. S. Bagnall, K. Brodersen, C. B. Champion, A. Erskine, & S. R. Huebner (Eds.), The encyclopedia of ancient history. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444338386.wbeah15006.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Singleton, T. A. (1995). The archaeology of slavery in North America. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 119–140.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sørensen M. L. S., Evans C., & Richter K. (2011). A place of history: Archaeology and heritage at Cidade Velha, Cape Verde. In Lane & MacDonald, 2011b, pp. 421–442.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stahl, A. B. (2008). The slave trade as practice and memory: What are the issues for archaeologists? In C. M. Cameron (Ed.), Invisible citizens: Captives and their consequences (pp. 25–56). Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stahl, A. B. (2015). Circulations through worlds apart: Georgian and Victorian England in an African Mirror. In F. G. Richard (Ed.), Materializing colonial encounters: Archaeologies of African experience (pp. 71–94). New York: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Swanepoel, N. (2011). Different conversations about the same thing? Source materials in the recreation of a nineteenth-century slave-raiding landscape, Northern Ghana. In Lane & MacDonald, 2011b, pp. 167–197.

    Google Scholar 

  • Thiaw, I. (2011). Slaves without shackles: An archaeology of everyday life in Gorée Island, Senegal. In Lane & MacDonald, 2011b, pp. 147–165.

    Google Scholar 

  • Torres, J. B., Stone, A. C., & Kittles, R. (2013). An anthropological genetic perspective on creolization in the Anglophone Caribbean. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 151, 135–143.

    Google Scholar 

  • Vernet, T. (2009). Slave trade and slavery on the Swahili coast (1500–1750). In B. A. Mirzai, I. M. Montana, & P. Lovejoy (Eds.), Slavery, Islam and diaspora (pp. 37–76). Trenton: Africa World Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Walz, J. R., & Brandt, S. A. (2006). Toward an archaeology of the other Africa diaspora: The slave trade and dispersed Africans in the Western Indian Ocean. In J. B. Haviser & K. C. MacDonald (Eds.), African re-genesis: Confronting social issues in the diaspora (pp. 246–268). Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Webster, J. (2008). Slavery, archaeology and the politics of analogy. Archaeological Dialogues, 15, 139–149.

    Google Scholar 

  • Willis, J. R. (Ed.). (1985). Slaves and slavery in Africa. Volume one: Islam and the ideology of enslavement. London: Frank Cass.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wood, W. R. (1967). An archaeological appraisal of early European settlements in the Senegambia. The Journal of African History, 8(1), 39–64.

    Google Scholar 

  • Worden, N. (1985). Slavery in Dutch South Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editors for their invitation to contribute to the EAA session on which this book is based and to this volume, and for their patience and helpful comments on an earlier draft. Natalie Swanepoel and Detlef Gronenborn also kindly commented on this earlier draft and responded positively to my request for possible illustrations. I would also like to thank Angus Graham, Anne Haour, Antonia Malan, Neil Norman, Judy Sealy and Natalie Swanepoel for permission to reproduce their illustrations. Any remaining errors or misunderstandings are entirely my responsibility.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Jennifer Ward Oppenheimer Professor of the Deep History & Archaeology of Africa, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Paul J. Lane

Authors
  1. Paul J. Lane
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Paul J. Lane .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of History, University of Szczecin, Szczecin, Poland

    Felix Biermann

  2. Associate Professor at the University of Oxford, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, UK

    Marek Jankowiak

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Lane, P.J. (2021). Recent Approaches to the Archaeological Investigation of Slavery in Africa. In: Biermann, F., Jankowiak, M. (eds) The Archaeology of Slavery in Early Medieval Northern Europe. Themes in Contemporary Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73291-2_3

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73291-2_3

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-73290-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-73291-2

  • eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation