Research

My research examines the effects of local tastes on broader-scale economic and social relationships during the period of ‘legitimate’ trade in Amedeka, southeastern Ghana. Africanist historians have described ‘legitimate’ trade as the socio-economic activities that developed after the British abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1807. Post-1807, a decline in the exportation of enslaved Africans caused an economic vacuum. To replace the vacuum, the British pushed for the exploitation of so-called legitimate tropical trade goods such as palm oil, groundnuts, rubber, and timber. However, the demand for labor within West Africa to produce these legitimate goods led to an increase in internal slavery and a prolonged abolition of slavery in West Africa.

My work contributes to the methodology of alternative histories of global entanglement. This methodology considers the interests of historically underrepresented groups by bringing together archaeological methods, anthropological theories, and historical data in conversation with deeply layered indigenous knowledge and memories in the making of the Atlantic world.

Through ongoing analyses of archaeological materials excavated from three sites in southeastern Ghana, combined with multidisciplinary analytic approaches, I highlight the transformations in local consumption practices by tracking and following the movement of commodities and how people incorporate different artifact classes into different social contexts. Contrary to common accounts about Africans as passive and indiscriminate consumers of imported goods, archaeological data from the southeastern region of Ghana suggest that local consumers were highly discriminative consumers of imported and regionally produced commodities. My work tacks back and forth between the archaeological data and multidisciplinary approaches to centralize local consumers in the narratives of global encounters. In sum, I ask questions that highlight the different historical conditions that continue to affect Africa’s representation in the world economies.

Generous fellowships from Northwestern University, the Social Science Research Council’s Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship, and the University of Missouri Research Reactor Center Pre-Doctoral Award support my research. I have presented my work at the African Seminar Annual Conference (2018), the Society of American Archaeology Conference (2018), the congress Pan African Archaeological Association for Prehistory and Related Studies (2018), and the Society of Africanist Archaeologists Conference (2018; 2020-canceled due to COVID-19).