This is the first book devoted to the archaeology of African life on both sides of the Atlantic; it highlights the importance of archaeology in completing the historical records of the Atlantic world s Africans. Archaeology of Atlantic Africa and the African Diaspora presents a diverse, richly textured picture of Africans experiences during the era of the Atlantic slave trade and offers the most comprehensive explanation of how African lives became entangled with the creation of the modern world. Through interdisciplinary approaches to material culture, the dynamics of a comparative...

Focusing on everyday rituals, the essays in this volume look at spheres of social action and the places throughout the Atlantic world where African-descended communities have expressed their values, ideas, beliefs, and spirituality in material terms. The contributors trace the impact of encounters with the Atlantic world on African cultural formation, how entanglement with commerce, commodification, and enslavement and with colonialism, emancipation, and self-rule manifested itself in the shaping of ritual acts such as those associated with birth, death, healing, and protection. Taken as a...