Liza Gijanto

Connecting African Diaspora and West African Historical Archaeologies

Historical archaeology is a growing and vibrant field of inquiry in West Africa. Since the 1980s, there has been a steady increase in the number studies related to the Atlantic trade and indigenous–European interaction. As the departure point for Africans entering the diaspora, West Africa should be at the forefront of the African Atlantic archaeology, a concept recently championed by A. Ogundiran and T. Falola. Despite the logistical challenges that often inhibit fieldwork, as well as difficulties in communication between Western and African scholars, significant amounts of work have been carried out in West Africa that can inform diaspora and African Atlantic archaeology. By presenting the current state of West African historical archaeology as it relates to common questions and themes within African diaspora studies, the following review serves as a means of initiating an in-depth engagement and discussion among researchers in all related fields and in every region of the Atlantic basin.

Socio-economic interaction and ceramic aesthetic: understanding West African ceramic production and use in context

This paper explores the multi-faceted nature of ceramic production and use in the context of contact and interaction through a detailed examination of pottery manufacture immediately before, during and after the decline of the Atlantic trade at the trading site of Juffure on the Gambia River. It is argued that potters’ decisions during the production process affected the aesthetic qualities of pots, including paste colour, temper, form and decoration and that some of these qualities are the by-products of acts of social displays related to diet. Analysis of ceramics during each phase of the Atlantic trade demonstrates that the potters’ choices were not exclusively expressions of communal ethnic identity of the producers or users. Additionally, the heightened production and eventual abandonment of this industry at Juffure fails to display a relationship between ceramics and personal identity. Rather, it is the broader socio-economic processes such as population fluctuations, consumer demand and socio-economic interactions as opposed to ethnic identity formation and maintenance, that affected shifts in local ceramic production.

Competing narratives: tensions between diaspora tourism and the Atlantic past in the Gambia

The Gambia River was among the first regions of West Africa incorporated into the Atlantic slave trade. The local commercial centre that emerged by the eighteenth century included the village of Juffure. By the nineteenth century, the commercial centre entered a period of decline as Gambia became a formal British colony. Upon exiting the colonial realm of the British, the Gambia immediately entered the landscape of European tourism. Following the publication of Haleys novel, Roots, the Gambia and the residents of Juffure began to shape their identity around the Roots narrative and a tourist landscape was created to foster this narrative. The remnants of the former Atlantic trading centre surrounding Juffure and the designated UNESCO World Heritage Area in addition to the Roots landscape all incorporate similar historic and heritage built features. The three underlying narratives, however, actively contradict one another. Through an approach to history-making as a cultural process incorporating a guided, experiential understanding of landscapes, the purposeful movement of tourists through the built environment in order to promote one of three physically visible narratives is addressed applying a test of historic credibility developed by Appadurai in order to address issues of competing authenticity.

Ceramics in the African Atlantic: new perspectives on social, economic, political and other everyday interactions

This collection of papers originated from the session entitled ‘‘Ceramics in the African Atlantic: New Perspectives on Social, Economic, Political, and other Everyday Interactions’’ at the 2011 Society of Historical Archaeology Conference in Austin, Texas. Moving beyond descriptive approaches to ceramic analysis, it offers new theoretical, conceptual and interpretive frameworks with which to examine how the physical, stylistic and technological attributes of ceramics shed light on processes of regional interaction, economic organisation, power relations, political formations and social reproduction of communities, families, and polities in Atlantic West Africa. The societies and former polities studied by the contributors include examples from modern-day Bénin, The Gambia, Senegal and Nigeria, offering a wide geographical expanse of the differences between larger regions such as the Bight of Benin, as well as smaller ones such as Senegambia. The contributors to this issue neither view ceramics as static markers of group affiliation nor as backdrops to culture making, but rather as an active material domain for cultural formation and transformation at multiple scales of quotidian lives. Therefore, these essays collectively demonstrate how ceramics can be used to explain some aspects of the cultural transformations that took place as a result of the interlocking of West Africa in the Atlantic world networks. Likewise, the papers in this volume explore the impact of broader social, political and economic interactions on ceramic manufacture and design, demonstrating the often rapid change in the techniques of ceramic production and in ceramic formal properties during this period and reflecting the broader societal trends and fluid interactions of which ceramics were a part. These articles also respond to some of the broad issues of relevance to the archaeology of the African Atlantic world. Utilitarian ceramic vessels have been at the centre of the study of African Atlantic archaeology, especially in making inferences about African identities in the Americas. The latter effort is, however, often plagued by oversimplification of the cultural complexity and changes within West African communities between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, something that gives rise to a tendency to draw one-to-one comparisons between the nineteenth-century societies in Africa and seventeenth through nineteenth-century archaeological contexts in the diaspora. This is particularly the case in relation to

Stone Circles and Atlantic Forts: Tourism and Management of Gambia’s World Heritage Sites

Since independence, tourism has been a growing sector of the Gambian economy. It began and largely is still defined by “sun and beach” tourists from Europe. It was not until after the 1994 coup that serious efforts were made to diversify this sector. This was largely an effort to tap into the growing African diaspora tourism industry and involved the development of heritage sites under the management of the National Centre for Arts and Culture (NCAC). Central to this was the designation of two UNESCO World Heritage Areas within the small river nation. The first, James Island and Related Sites, focuses on the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the early colonial capital of Banjul. All sites in this grouping relate to either the slave trade or its abolition and thus are marketed to African diaspora tourists. The second group, Stone Circles of the Senegambia, includes sites in the Gambia and Senegal offering a different set of challenges for management and promotion. Additionally, while the first group of sites are relatively accessible and attracted a significant number of tourists prior to the designation, the stone circles are less accessible and receive fewer visitors. This chapter assesses the progress of the NCAC development of these heritage sites in relation to the growth of tourism in the Gambia. In particular, we address the challenges of maintenance, visitation and interpretation.

Historic Preservation and Development in Banjul, The Gambia

Abstract The city of Banjul and Gambia colony were established as part of the British abolition efforts on the West African coast in 1816. Unfortunately, the role of Banjul and Gambia in ending the trans-Atlantic slave trade is overshadowed by the current emphasis within the heritage tourism sector on the local dynamics of the slave trade. This, coupled with the continual expansion of port facilities within the capital city of Banjul, has led to the rapid disappearance of much of the nation’s colonial past. This article addresses the challenges and possibilities for cultural resource management as an aid to development and interpretation in Banjul and The Gambia.