This session brings together historical archaeological research that reexamines the interwoven worlds of coastal and inland societies in West Africa from the fifteenth to twentieth centuries. Moving beyond narratives that privilege major states or focus solely on coastal enclaves, this session seeks papers that highlight the diverse strategies through which smaller polities on the supposed margins of the Atlantic negotiated change and continuity. We seek contributions that center themes of power, resistance, agency, fluidity, globalization, and inland connections across sociopolitical landscapes in West Africa. We will also welcome contributions that investigate the influence of Western actors like missionaries whose economic, political, and social interventions played uneven roles in consolidating, fragmenting, or reshaping local structures. Papers from scholars using interdisciplinary archaeological, archival, oral, and heritage-based approaches to understand and reconfigure coastal-inland connections; the role of the transatlantic trade in statebuilding in less-centralized polities; and the role of western actors like missionaries and colonial administrators, and the agency of Indigenous communities in these activities during the fifteenth to twentieth centuries are encouraged. This session contributes to a body of scholarship in West African archaeology that reframes West Africa’s interior–coast dynamics as spaces of negotiation rather than peripheries or margins of Atlantic or imperial systems.
This panel is co-organized by Megan Crutcher (Trinity College), mcrutche@trincoll.edu and Kofi Nutor (Texas A&M University), knutor@tamu.edu. You can contact either of us to participate by March 10.
