The Society for Georgia Archaeology (SGA) has published "Material Reflections of Georgia's African-American Past" as a two-part edition of Early Georgia, issues 35(2) and 36(1). Guest edited by J. W. Joseph and containing 11 articles, these publications look at African-American landscapes, architecture, material culture, and lifeways as revealed by archaeological research in Georgia.

Articles in these volumes include: African-American Life in Georgia Through the Archaeological Looking Glass, by J. W. Joseph; Data Recovery Excavations at the St. Annes Slave Settlement, St. Simons Island, Georgia, by Scott Butler; African-American Contributions to Savannah's Historic Landscapes, by Bradford Botwick; Landownership and Hardship: Interpreting the Landscape of an African-American Community in Eastern Gwinnett County, 1870-1950, by Jeffrey L. Holland; Archaeology of a Tenant Farming Landscape: The Free Cabin Site, Hephzibah, Georgia, by Natalie Adams and Mark Swanson; Residential and Communal Landscapes at the Ford Plantation Development, Richmond Hill, Georgia, by Thomas G. Whitley; South of Hell's Gate: Life at the North End Plantation, Ossabaw Island, Georgia, by Daniel T. Elliott; Necessity or Commodity?: An Analysis of the Ford Plantation Colonoware, Bryan County, Georgia, by Nicole Isenbarger; Home-crafted "Brick" Grave Markers in the African-American Section of Memory Hill Cemetery, Milledgeville, Georgia, by James J. D'Angelo; "A City Slave is Almost a Freeman" . . . Or Not?, by Rita F. Elliott; and Springfield: An Archaeological History of a Free African-American Community from the Revolution to the Civil War, by J. W. Joseph.

Compilations of these articles in pdf format on CD are available for purchase. To order, submit a check for $11 made payable for the Society for Georgia Archaeology as well as a letter with your name and address to J. W. Joseph, New South Associates, 6150 East Ponce de Leon Avenue, Stone Mountain, GA 30083. Early Georgia is a copyrighted publication and unauthorized distribution of articles is prohibited by law. For further information about the SGA as well as membership applications, visit www.thesga.org.

As Americans mark the 40th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., more states are apologizing for their historic role in slavery in an effort to begin healing the wounds created by what many have called the country's "original sin."

Florida last month became the sixth state to adopt a resolution expressing "profound regret for the shameful chapter" in the state's history and promoting "healing and reconciliation among all Floridians."

Alabama, Maryland, North Carolina, New Jersey and Virginia had previously done so, and two other states -- Nebraska and Missouri -- are considering similar resolutions this year.

National black leaders applaud these gestures as an important step in reconciling the nation's long-standing racial differences, but caution that further actions, including reparations, are needed.

"I think it's very productive for states to look at their roles in the slavery movement. It's a good place to start," said Hilary Shelton of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. But he said, "unless further discussions follow, their actions will be viewed as very hollow."

All six state resolutions passed with near unanimous approval, although debates that preceded passage focused on whether an official apology amounts to an admission of guilt that could lead to calls for reparations -- payments to the descendants of slaves for their suffering and lost economic opportunities.

The same issue has stymied efforts at the federal level to issue a national apology.

Last year, Tennessee Democrat Rep. Steve Cohen proposed that the federal government apologize for slavery and the so-called Jim Crow laws that victimized blacks after the Civil War. So far, Cohen's bill has not moved and requests for a presidential apology remain unanswered.

But at least one governor, Florida Republican Charlie Crist, has not shied away from the issue of reparations. When he signed Florida's apology resolution last month, Crist said he was open to considering financial reparations -- not this year, but when the state's financial situation improves.

"I was floored. He had absolutely no hesitation," said author Ronald Walters, a leader in the push for reparations. "No other governor has ever done that."

In fact, several states have tried to put a lid on the issue by making clear their apologies are not a step toward reparations.

In Georgia, the state with the second largest pre-Civil War slave population, Gov. Sonny Perdue and other Republican politicians rejected a 2007 apology proposal, because they said it could make the state liable for financial reparations.

The states' apology movement comes as a reaction to a highly-publicized, national push for reparations that peaked in 2002, Walters said. Since then, black state lawmakers decided reparations may not be possible any time soon, but an apology or expression of regret could start the process, he said.

In 2001, a group of black lawyers sued several U.S. insurance companies for having written policies on slaves for their owners. That same year, black leaders unsuccessfully urged President Bush to join a United Nation's sponsored conference on racism and reparations.

Several insurance companies later apologized for their role in enabling slavery, and California enacted a law calling on every insurance company in the state to research and report to the state its historical connections to the slave trade.

But the movement faded over the next four years, leading black lawmakers in several states to take a different approach, said Walters, who as a scholar at the University of Maryland, was instrumental in developing the state's 2006 legislative apology proposal.

Maryland in 2006 was the first state to consider an apology resolution, but Virginia -- the state that once had the largest slave population in the country (490,865, according to an 1860 census) -- in February 2007 became the first to enact a resolution.

"Virginia was the leader," said Democratic state Sen. Henry Marsh, III. "We started a dialog concerning slavery and race relations which we had hoped would happen. Other states immediately began calling us, asking how we did it," said Marsh, who sponsored the resolution. Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) signed a resolution in March 2007 and governors in Alabama, New Jersey and North Carolina signed similar bills later in the year.

This year, Missouri supporters of an apology, which failed to pass the legislature last year, say the action would help heal racial wounds in a state that was so divided during the Civil War that it sent troops to both sides.

The Show Me state also is known for its 1856 court ruling denying a slave named Dred Scott citizenship rights. The decision, later upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, led to enactment of the 13th and14th amendments to the Constitution, which abolished slavery and established legal rights for former slaves. As further evidence of Missouri's historical conflict over slavery, it later became the only state to enact its own emancipation law.

The recent apologies are not the first time states have taken action against slavery ahead of the federal government. In 1777, more than eight decades before President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves in the South, Vermont passed a law declaring the slave trade illegal. New York enacted a similar statute the following year.

"This is the moment for a national apology, because we have a historical first with a black candidate running in the Democratic party," said Carol Swain of Vanderbilt University, who has urged President Bush to hold a Rose Garden ceremony to apologize for slavery.

"I expect states will continue to apologize, state-by-state, in a piecemeal, federalist fashion, and it might make it easier for the federal government to act," Swain said.

New Book

Africa, Brazil and the Construction of Trans Atlantic Black Identities
Edited by Livio Sansone, Elisee Soumonni, and Boubacar Barry.
Africa World Press, Trenton, New Jersey; Paperback, 356 pp., ISBN-13: 978-1592215270, January 2008.

Description from the Publisher:

The flow of ideas about race, anti-racism and black or African identity across the Atlantic is the focus of this volume of essays drawn from a very special international South-South workshop held on the island of Goree, Senegal, in December 2002, the aim of which was twofold.

First, it critically assessed the study of fluxes and refluxes, ruptures and reciprocal influences in the relations between the two shores of the Atlantic. Certainly, the relative lack of direct contact between Africa and the New World over the last century helps to explain why in Africa, as well as in Latin America, the debate over notions of race and ethnic identity has received more attention than the historical phenomena of civilization, metissage and the relationship of domination between the North and South. The workshop also scrutinized the agenda of the leading researchers of this field of study (classic scholars, e.g. Melville Herskovits, C. Anta Diopp, Roger Bastide and Pierre Verger, as well as more contemporary scholars).

Second, the workshop aimed at creating a common field from which a number of topics for joint research projects on the double dimension Africa/Diaspora can emerge: how to reestablish direct South-South contacts across the Atlantic and bring to the Black Atlantic a Southern perspective, by broadening the scope of this notion and making it more cosmopolitan and genuinely transnational by trespassing the magic limits of the English-speaking world and confronting the colonial legacy of Spain, Portugal, France and the Netherlands in the New World. Such an attempt cries for new comparative studies, the methodology of which should be closely scrutinized under the light of our epoch characterized by a growing set of global ethnic icons, which make the distinction between local specificities and grand transnational ethnic or liberation projects increasingly difficult to pinpoint.

The thirteen contributors to the book write from different positions and perspectives, but focus on ideas in transit and the transit of ideas. The organizers hold firmly that, especially in the making and deconstructing of notions of race and of different races, little is as local as often celebrated. If this is always the case in the processes of racialization that have accompanied the making of the modern world more generally, it is even more pronounced in the context of black versus white relations, a context that comes into being through a gigantic international operation the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

New Book

Themes in West Africa's History
Edited by Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong.
Ohio University Press; Paperback, 288 pp., ISBN-13: 978-0-8214-1641-9, 2008.

Description from the Publisher:

There has long been a need for a new textbook on West Africa's history. In Themes in West Africa's History, editor Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong and his contributors meet this need, examining key themes in West Africa's prehistory to the present through the lenses of their different disciplines.

The contents of the book comprise an introduction and thirteen chapters divided into three parts. Each chapter provides an overview of existing literature on major topics, as well as a short list of recommended reading, and breaks new ground through the incorporation of original research. The first part of the book examines paths to a West African past, including perspectives from archaeology, ecology and culture, linguistics, and oral traditions. Part two probes environment, society, and agency and historical change through essays on the slave trade, social inequality, religious interaction, poverty, disease, and urbanization. Part three sheds light on contemporary West Africa in exploring how economic and political developments have shaped religious expression and identity in significant ways.

Themes in West Africa's History represents a range of intellectual views and interpretations from leading scholars on West Africa's history. It will appeal to college undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars in the way it draws on different disciplines and expertise to bring together key themes in West Africa's history, from prehistory to the present.

Call for Papers

Black Diaspora and Germany Across the Centuries
Conference at the German Historical Institute
Washington, D.C., March 19-21, 2009

Persons of African descent have been present in Europe throughout the past millennium. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Africans crossed the Mediterranean to Spain, Sicily, and Italy or made their way to Europe via the Middle East and the Byzantine Empire. In later centuries, the system of transatlantic trade brought black people from the different regions of the Americas to Europe.

In Central Europe, African "court moors" became increasingly present during the Early Modern Period and were an integral part of courtly representation. As a result of exchange processes between Europe, Africa, and the West Indies, the social roles of blacks in Europe and European discourses on blacks diversified over time. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, an increasing number of black Europeans lived in middle-class households, especially those of retired colonial officials, plantation owners or merchants residing in Europe. Others lived independently as seamen or as guild members. Transatlantic chattel slavery, however, fundamentally reconfigured Afro-European relations and transformed perceptions of black people throughout the Atlantic World. Over time, black people were increasingly referred to as "slaves" or "negroes" instead of "moors," an older term associated with, among other things, images of brave warriors that derived from the presence of black soldiers in the armies of the Islamic Empire on the Iberian Peninsula and humanist images of a Christian "land of the moors" ruled by a mythical Prester John in Ethiopia.

By the early nineteenth century, racist views on blacks had found broad public acceptance in Europe. Scientific racism, a branch of ethnology that began to infiltrate Western science from the 1840s onward, further consolidated notions of black inferiority and was widely used to justify the continued enslavement of African peoples. Simultaneously, proslavery arguments were vehemently challenged by Enlightenment ideas of human equality, which gained broader significance on both sides of the Atlantic through the rise of various abolitionist and revolutionary movements. This dialectical contest between racial egalitarianism and white supremacy persisted well into the early twentieth century, when the latter reemerged forcefully in the guise of European imperialism.

The conference "Black Diaspora and Germany Across the Centuries" will retrace these processes of change and revaluation from the eleventh century to the beginning of World War I. Particular emphasis will be laid on the interactions between blacks of various origins (the Americas, the Caribbean, Byzantine Empire, Africa, or born in Europe) and people in the German-speaking parts of Europe. Researchers of all disciplines are invited to discuss continuities and ruptures in this history of mutual perception and contact: migration, art and court historians, American, German and African studies as well as scholars from the field of cultural studies, literature, sociology, musicology, linguistics, etc.

Possible conference topics include: (1) Geopolitical and social spaces of communication and interaction: Which geographical areas and groups of individuals or social classes were involved in processes of exchange? What kind of action repertoires did these spaces leave or offer to people of color? (2) Perception and appropriation of African culture, art, music, etc. and their representations in various contexts (e.g. European court cultures, literature, art production). (3) Altering influence of religious, philosophical, and scientific discourses on modes of Afro-European contacts. (4) Race/Racism vs. egalitarianism as discourse and social practice in the African-German encounter.

Please send a proposal of no more than 500 words and a brief CV to Martin Klimke at klimke@ghi-dc.org; website http://www.ghi-dc.org. The deadline for submission is October 15, 2008. Participants will be notified by mid-November. The conference, held in English, will focus on discussing 5,000 to 6,000 word, precirculated papers (due February 1, 2009). Expenses for travel and accommodation will be covered. Conveners: Martin Klimke (GHI Washington), Anne Kuhlmann-Smirnov (History Department, University of Bremen), Mischa Honeck (Heidelberg Center for American Studies, University of Heidelberg).

Ten years after my exhortation to move the field "towards a postcolonial nautical archaeology" (McGhee 1998), it has been interesting to watch developments within nautical archaeology unfold. The response of the professional underwater archaeological community appears to have been the undertaking of research initiatives to locate and excavate more slave shipwrecks. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration funding has been used in several of these efforts, examples of which include the search for the wreck of the Trouvadore by the Turks & Caicos Museum (Sadler 2008), and the search for the remains of the Guerrero off the coast of Key Largo, Florida (Swanson 2004). "A total of 825 documented losses at sea are recorded among the 27,000 entries in the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (Eltis et al. 1999), with 183 of these losses occurring either whilst slaving or after embarkation (that is, with African captives almost certainly aboard)" (Webster 2008), so this remains a wide open field.

It has been gratifying to see the underwater archaeology community take the "data poor" (Singleton and Bograd 1995) portion of my critique for action. There certainly has always been a need for more fieldwork in this area. Unfortunately the other aspects of what I said, and their implications, remain unresolved. It is here where Marcus Rediker has done the underwater archaeology community, especially nautical archaeologists, a favor. His "human history" of this ghoulish commerce should help put to rest the notion that slave shipwreck archaeology is "nautical" archaeology in any sense that matters, and that the middle-range theory premises that have characterized nautical archaeology since its inception in the 1970s are ill-suited to the study of slave shipwrecks:

Unfortunately, many archaeologists have seen Binford's methods of studying site-formation process as an end in themselves. In many cases, the development of middle range theory has become the research goal rather than the means to connect archaeological data with high-level, abstract explanations . . . although such studies increase our interpretive abilities, they contribute little to the advancement of our understanding of human behavior (Maschner 1996:469).

In his note "to the reader" at the beginning of Black Reconstruction, W.E.B. Du Bois (1935) dryly observed in 1934 that "the story of transplanting millions of Africans to the new world, and of their bondage for four centuries for four centuries, is a fascinating one" filled with human drama of massive proportions. The great strength of Rediker's book lies in its insistence that there are people in this story, not statistics, obfuscatory categories, artifact typologies, or shipwreck parts, and that the proper vantage point for studying this subject is the lived all-too-human experiences of the people engaged in the drama:

An ethnography of the slave ship helps to demonstrate not only the cruel truth of what one group of people (or several) was willing to do to others for money -- or, better, capital -- but also how they managed in crucial respects to hide the reality and consequences of their actions from themselves and from posterity (Rediker 2007: 12).

The book is organized into ten chapters plus an introduction and an epilogue. Each chapter builds upon earlier chapters, with the beginning chapters (chapters 1-3) furnishing overall background, the middle four chapters providing description and interpretation of the experiences of the enslaved, crew and captain, and the last three chapters delivering skillful and deeply humanistic summary and interpretation.

Rediker's concern for the individual lived experiences of the participants in the trade is aided immensely by his command of the history of what life at sea is like. While scholars have been using the narrative of Olaudah Equiano to illuminate the experiences of enslavement for decades (Burnside and Robotham 1997), chapter 8 of The Slave Ship titled "The Sailor's Vast Machine" contains a learned and astute description of work and suffering at sea. What sticks out is violence, and the shocking degree to which physical and emotional terror was used as a tool for control and psychosexual masochism. Rediker rightly points out that both captives and crew were being exploited by the captain, officers, and sponsors of slave ship voyages, without going so far as to suggest that the sailors somehow had it worse than the slaves. Far from it; Rediker makes clear the degree to which the nascent concept of "race" was lived out onboard, and relates truly debauched tales of rape, torture, concubinage, and murder of essentially helpless children.

Anthropologically inclined readers will find much of interest in chapter 9 of Rediker's book, titled "From Captives to Shipmates." The argument is of course not new; Mintz and Price raised it in the 1970s as have others. In this chapter Rediker discusses favored anthropology themes such as resistance, revolt, music, dance, and other dimensions of the ethnogenisis of African-American culture. On page 305 he observes:

Slowly, in ways surviving documents do not allow us to see in detail, the idiom of kinship broadened, from immediate family to messes, to workmates, to friends, to countrymen and -- women, to the whole of the lower deck.

Rediker ends his book with a discussion of the fight to end the slave trade and with the moving testimony of cast-off and dying sailors being cared for by enslaved people in Caribbean ports. He writes, "Theirs was the most generous and inclusive conception of humanity I discovered in the course of my research for this book."

I wonder what conceptions of humanity continue to motivate certain anti-treasure hunting nautical archaeologists. The Henrietta Marie and Fredensborg remain the two most representative archaeological examples of slave ships in existence. The former, first located in the water by Moe Molinar a Panamanian of African descent in the employ of treasure hunter Mel Fisher, is particularly important. Yet it took an African-American recreational SCUBA diving club, the National Association of Black SCUBA Divers, to denote and demonstrate that shipwreck's importance and to bring its significance to wide attention. Properly trained nautical archaeologists still won't publicly touch that wreck with a ten-foot pole. Although they apparently gladly touch the significance of the H.L. Hunley a noted Civil War Confederate submarine.

The moral message of my 1998 article unfortunately remains.

This book should be on the must-read list of all subscribers to the newsletter. Although I have my minor quibbles with the volume, I found it challenging, interesting, and thoroughly worthwhile. I offer somewhat lengthy discussions of what I perceive as possible weaknesses of the study, yet I applaud the overall effort.

I believe that most readers will find this book a compelling study in African-Caribbean culture change and identity. The work benefits from good contexts, extensive excavations and analyses, and a moderately good archival record. The volume looks at the creation and maintenance of individual and corporate identities by a diverse group of African Caribbeans including African-born apprentices, enslaved creoles from the Bahamas, and enslaved African Americans brought to the Bahamas from South Carolina. The study is especially interesting because the planter was an outspoken ameliorist and provided written instructions on the care of his enslaved and apprenticed personnel. The authors, Laurie Wilkie and Paul Farnsworth, demonstrate a broad knowledge of West African ethnohistory and ethnography, and also are clearly current on the trends and recent findings of archaeology of the Diaspora. I applaud their focus on individuals as key actors in any tradition. There is much good archaeology and anthropology in this volume.

On the other hand, I believe certain readers may find the study to be mildly frustrating. Some may see the authors as pushing the envelope at numerous junctures. Whenever there are multiple possible explanations for an artifact or a behavior, the authors advocate African memory and African-derived traditions as the preferred explanations.

The first chapter is challenging. The subjects of memory and identity have not been widely addressed in archaeology, and the authors must borrow, or at least touch on, harmony ideology, sociocultural anthropology, modern psychology, practice, agency, structuration, performance, habitus, doxa, long-term and short-term memory, and tradition. When all is said and done, the authors end up with a stance that seems inherently sensible and attractive (p. 8):

We believe that individuals engage in meaningful, discursive social relations on a daily basis. Through their everyday practice, individuals reaffirm allegiances, and differences, with others and actively define their position within their broader community. Actors, depending on the specific context of social interaction and their own sense of self and experience, may or may not be conscious of how their actions convey meanings to others.

Chapter 2 presents an overview of Bahamian history from native Indian occupations up to the Loyalist period, when Clifton Plantation was established. Chapter 3 addresses the various sources of members of African Caribbean culture in the late eighteenth century.

The fourth chapter identifies the people of Clifton plantation, including the planter and his family, the apprentices (in theory, free men of African birth), and slaves. The researchers demonstrate that William Wylly saw the establishment and operation of Clifton as a grand experiment in the 'proper way' to manage enslaved people. As part of his ameliorative mindset (improve slavery, rather than emancipate slaves), Wylly attempted to provide better housing stock, greater individual freedom (as expressed in free time for the slaves to tend their own provisioning grounds and to attend markets), more opportunity for religious training, and greater emphasis on literacy training than seen on many plantations.

Chapter 4 also discusses the apprentices and slaves. Although the authors want very badly to be able to link individuals to specific archaeological deposits and architectural ruins, most of the archaeological contexts date from 1810-1820, and we do not see good archival information on individuals until 1818, and the key piece of evidence is an 1821 slave registry. The 1821 registry is recorded by family unit, and, asking for "a moment of indulgence" (p. 93), the authors attempt to reconstruct the spatial arrangement of families by assuming the record was made by traveling cabin to cabin, in order, within the community. The remainder of Chapter 4 provides pictures of each the family units at Clifton. This presentation is a highly effective means of emphasizing the importance of individuals, each with their own history.

Chapter 5 outlines the history of the archaeological research effort at Clifton. The authors use a familiar, locus-by-locus narrative that helps create a feel for the cultural landscape. The archaeological fieldwork at the site was extensive, and the partially standing ruins, yard walls, and provision field markers provided good contexts. The choices regarding investigative techniques and excavation locations were sensible and were clearly linked to the research design.

Chapter 6 interprets artifact distribution and types. I had some issues with this chapter. The authors want to see access to arms limited to the driver, yet their data show a wide distribution of arms among the village site. Arms artifacts were recovered from the driver’s house, the slave kitchen, four of the six slave houses, and both slave barracks.

The best exposure of a back yard was from Locus H. The excavations revealed two postholes carved into bedrock and a limestone hearth platform in line with the two postholes. Although the hearth platform is only 1.7 meters from one of the posts, the authors interpret the evidence as showing two distinct activity areas. However, when the artifact distribution maps are reviewed (Figures 6.7-6.9 and 6.11-6.15), the data suggest that the posts and hearth platform are part of a single structure. Why the contortions to make these two distinct areas? One of the reasons was apparently to make a discovered coin be centered in the two-post structure, a location key to the argument that "the penny was placed so that it was lined up with both the center of the postholes and the center of the house’s backdoor" (p. 174). With this penny, another penny, and a figurine face, context is key to understanding the possible protective uses of these items. This reader would have liked to have seen greater detail on all these contexts.

The discussion of yard proxemics is weakened by an implicit reliance on the Pompei principle; the researchers consider that the location of a discarded item directly reflects where that item was used (this despite their earlier argument for swept yards). For example, they state (p. 192, parenthetical in original) "as at the other houses, the intensity of utilization of space (as evidenced by densities of artifacts) is greatest at distances of five meters and farther from the house." This is true only if the following apply: the utilization of space was for refuse disposal only; and there was absolutely no secondary refuse disposal. These two conditions contradict their interpretation of backyard uses.

The authors discuss three artifacts as possibly related to Obeah. A figurine face was found in one corner of the kitchen beneath a floor disturbed by "the action of roots or intentional human action" (p. 201). The lack of any additional sherds of the figurine led the archaeologists to suspect that the face alone had been brought to the location. Within a single paragraph (p. 202), the same evidence that had been interpreted as possibly reflecting root disturbance of the floor is now seen as Obeah: "Given the placement of the head and its orientation, and its location buried under the torn-up floor, we could not rule out the possibility that this was some sort of intentional act: a shrine? an offering? a warning?" Despite the presence of many children on the slave street, and despite the fact that pan-culturally children like heads and faces as playthings, Wilkie and Farnsworth do not consider play as a possible explanation.

The second possible Obeah object was the fresh penny found in Locus I. This perfect penny was purposefully placed (they never explain how they know the penny was not just lost in this high-activity area) 8-10 centimeters below surface in a midden deposit that reached 32 centimeters below surface. If this penny was placed in already accrued midden, it likely dates to well after the slave occupation.

Another coin was recovered, in Locus H, again in line with the center of the back door. The context of this coin is not detailed, but it also was apparently recovered from the upper portion of the midden zone.

In Chapter 7, foodways are reconstructed based on oral history and archaeology. The discussion is somewhat confusing, because the distinction is not always made between practices that may have had resonance with African memories and practices that were a continuation of African practice. Can we safely say the Bahaman pepper pot method of cooking is an African-derived behavior, when native groups in the Caribbean were using pepper pots for hundreds of years before the arrival of Africans?

Chapter 8 is titled "Things They Bought." The authors imply that the slaves purchased any of the artifacts with a possible reference to African memory, but were supplied all the other, non-African, artifacts (e.g., low-cost plates). The ceramics discussion is problematic because we cannot possibly know the source (planter purchase or hand-me-down, or slave purchase or barter) of any of the recovered ceramics. In a very subtle circular argument, we are asked to accept that the slaves purchased certain items because those items fit with an African-derived decorative style; and, because only those of African ancestry would recognize or value that style, only those of African descent would have purchased such items. This ignores the fact that the items fitting this style were widely sold to all ethnic and racial groups in Europe, Africa, North America, South America, and the Caribbean. The degree of similarity of a Staffordshire decoration to an African-derived aesthetic cannot help us decide whether a planter or slave purchased the piece.

We also have no knowledge of the range of decorations available at the local market. This is important because Wilkie and Farnsworth argue that the Clifton African Caribbeans were demonstrating a preference for pieces matching an African-derived aesthetic. We may be seeing only the decorative preferences of a shipping clerk on the Thames or the purchasing whims of Wylly, rather than purchases reflecting the decorative memories of African Caribbeans.

The researchers use economic scaling to argue that the slaves were purchasing most of their own ceramics. In a confusing argument, they say that Wylly (a well-to-do planter, known to have spent more than required on his slaves) would not have spent the extra money to get his slaves more expensive ceramics. Instead, we are expected to believe that the cash-poor slaves spent more of their hard-earned money than necessary, buying the more expensive ceramics rather than buying the basics (and saving some money for foodstuffs).

By page 272, Wilkie and Farnsworth seem to be hedging their bets: "the selection of decorated English-manufactured pottery, therefore, must be seen as directed by a variety of aesthetic concerns that may or may not have been related at all to traditional preferences in pot appearance, yet still possibly influenced by those considerations." The banding on factory-turned slipware is rightly argued to be similar to West African fabrics. A few vessels with bird motifs are seen as beckoning back to the importance of birds in the mythology of some West African tribes. A geometric design hand-painted on a pearlware bowl -- at the point of its decoration in the factory in England -- must be a cosmogram, and therefore must have made the bowl attractive to the slaves (Strangely, though, elsewhere in the Diaspora, the actual creation of a cosmogram by the individual African American actor is integral to the importance of that cosmogram in ritual. Can we really say how an African Caribbean would respond to a cosmogram mass-produced by some English potter? Are we sure it would be a positive reaction?).

The hunt for African resonance continues in the discussion of ceramic pipes. As with the ceramics, issues of supply and available selection are not adequately addressed.

At page 295, the authors note "Of course, it is possible to read too much into these things." This is a brave statement to make, and I think it is an implicit recognition that not all archaeologists will accept all of their interpretations. There is little doubt that the culture of the enslaved and apprenticed at Clifton included behaviors that reached back to African origins or that resonated with an African memory. To their credit, Wilkie and Farnsworth seem to acknowledge that it is a matter of degree.

Having voiced my reservations about this volume, it is important to revisit its many strengths. The archaeological study of Clifton represents one of the most extensive archaeological examinations to date of a Caribbean plantation. There are several strong data sets from the excavations and analyses, complemented by an interesting and fairly extensive archival record. This volume documents a key time in the development of what has become the Bahamian identity.

Archaeologists of the African Diaspora range from those who readily see African-derived traits or behaviors in sites of African Americans or African Caribbeans, to those archaeologists who are extremely cautious in harking back to African origins. I think this study from Wilkie and Farnsworth underlines that range in perspectives, and I think the degree of acceptance of their arguments will vary according to the stance of the individual reader. Although I am firmly on the skeptical end of the spectrum, I found this volume an intriguing and challenging read. It is an important contribution to the archaeological literature of the Diaspora. I encourage all the subscribers to the newsletter to read Sampling Many Pots.

This volume sets out in seven chapters to accomplish three major objectives. These are: (1) deriving a chronology for the Central Niger Delta from the archaeological record; (2) reconstructing past life ways including dispersal and migrations in the Central Delta; and (3) highlighting possible intra and inter community relationships in the general Delta area. [Read or download this full review here in Adobe .pdf format >>>].

[Return to table of contents]

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Book Review

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-AfrArts, http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~artsweb/ (March 2008).

Kathleen Bickford Berzock. For Hearth and Altar: African Ceramics from the Keith Achepohl Collection. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005. 203 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-300-1149-5; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 0-86559-221-7.

Reviewed for H-AfrArts by Susan Cooksey, Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida.

Presence and Prominence: Foregrounding African Ceramics

For Hearth and Altar accompanied an exhibition curated by the author, Kathleen Bickford Berzock, which opened at the Chicago Art Institute in 2005. This publication, with its substantive but accessible text and beautiful illustrations, was written for general readers, yet it will appeal to scholars as well. The book begins with a transcription of Berzock's interview with collector Keith Achepohl, a printmaker and professor emeritus of printmaking at the University of Iowa. Berzock's interview with Achepohl reveals the collector's passion for African ceramics as one informed and enhanced by his artist's eye. "Ceramics in Africa," an introductory essay by Berzock, follows with a discussion of the ancient traditions of ceramic production, and overviews of techniques, aesthetics, and interpretation. Within these overviews, the author elaborates on the relationship of ceramics to metallurgy, the refinement and continuity of techniques, the secular and sacred roles of ceramic vessels, and the pervasive metaphor of pot as body in various African ceramic traditions. She connects these themes to examples in the Achepohl collection featured in the catalogue as well as to other examples from the continent. Illustrations in this chapter focus on methods of production, and include several large color photographs of various stages of ceramic production, a photograph of a Yoruba Shango shrine, and a map of the continent.

The eight chapters that follow are organized according to geographic regions with the headings of "Ancient Civilizations of the Niger Bend," "Berber North Africa," "West Africa: Sahel and Savanna," "West Africa: Forest and Coast," "Eastern Nigeria and Cameroon," "Central Africa," and "Eastern and Southern Africa." Each chapter includes an introductory essay, a map, and short essays for each object selected from the Achepohl collection. These essays provide not only a compilation of data, but also new insight into ethnography, production, function, historical context, and interpretation by drawing on published literature and recent communications with scholars in the field. The inclusion of copious endnotes and extensive bibliography testify to the author's depth of research. Chapters that discuss large groups of related works, such as those of the Inland Niger Delta, Baatonu, Gur speakers, Nupe, and Zulu, are the most successful in illustrating the wealth of stylistic variations and cross-cultural influences present in African ceramics. Only the chapter on Berber North Africa, with a mere four objects illustrated, has too few comparative examples to make this point effectively. Each of the 125 works featured is illustrated with a color plate (some also have additional detail shots) that allows close inspection of fine surface details, such as incised marks and subtle variations in coloration, coatings, and patina. The use of neutral gray or black backgrounds allows full appreciation of the ceramicist's sensitivity to form, texture, and color.

The components of the book discussed thus far -- interview, introduction, and entries -- suffice as expected features for a single collection catalogue. However, there are also six sets of interleaves between chapters that are an innovative feature of content and design. The interleaves are distinguished from the other text by varied hues of terracotta. Each interleaf focuses on a specific contextual theme, presented as a visual essay, with large field photographs that have extended captions. Thematic titles are "Pottery and the Home," "Granaries and Grain Containers," "Pottery and the Body," "The Potter's Art," "Engaging the World Beyond," and "Beer and Palm Wine." At first glance, this choice of themes may appear arbitrary and incomplete. The placement of the interleaves seems random, in that they do not form a transition between the chapters that flank them. Apparently, they were designed to provide an alternative to the standard catalogue format and, more important, to dispel any sense of cultural compartmentalization suggested by the geographically organized chapters. In the interleaves, commonalities of ceramic arts on the continent are emphasized by juxtaposing diverse examples. For example, the interleaf "Pottery and the Body" includes a photograph of a Yungur girl with elaborate abdominal scarification, with a caption stating that ''throughout Africa the patterns that embellish pots are part of a wider aesthetic and symbolic system that also frequently includes marks on the body," and then discusses markings on women's bodies in the Ga'anda Hills of northeastern Nigeria that may also be seen on Ga'anda containers, such as the one in the catalogue (pp. 90). Other images featured in "Pottery and the Body" include a close-up of a Luba woman's coiffure from the 1930s, a Berber woman with facial tattoos, a Vodun shrine with a figural pot, and a Senufo woman carrying a water jar. Each illustrates a parallel to a work in the catalogue.

While some ideas presented in the interleaves are also discussed in the essays, the interleaves reinforce and enhance their relevance. Throughout the interleaves, photographs of potters at work and people using ceramic containers in food preparation, for storage, and in sacred spaces emphasize the pervasive presence and vitality of ceramics in contemporary African life. Clearly, the interleaves provide contextual information that complements and broadens the scope of the book beyond a standard catalogue or survey. However, including contextual images next to objects illustrated in the catalogue would have been helpful in several instances.

The profusion of African ceramics and lack of cohesive scholarship poses a challenge that is reflected in the few surveys that have been published. None of those attempted (i.e., Nigel Barley, Smashing Pots: Works of Clay from Africa [1994]; Arnulf Stossel, Bernard Fagg, and Maria Kecskesi, Afrikanische Keramik: traditionelle Handwerkskunst sudlich der Sahara [1984]; and Karl Ferdinand Schadler, Keramik aus Schwarz Afrika und Alt Amerika: die Sammlung Hans Wolf [1985]) could claim to have the combination of consistently high-quality images with the scope and depth of analysis of objects and ideas presented in For Hearth and Altar. This is an engaging, thoughtful, and aesthetically enticing publication that will have enduring value as a resource for study of African ceramics.

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©2008 African Diaspora Archaeology Network
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Last updated: June 29, 2008

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