This volume examines the archaeology of precolonial West African societies in the era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Using historical and archaeological perspectives on landscape, this collection of essays sheds light on how involvement in the commercial revolutions of the early modern period dramatically reshaped the regional contours of political organization across West Africa. The essays examine how social and political transformations occurred at the regional level by exploring regional economic networks, population shifts, cultural values, and ideologies. The book demonstrates the importance of anthropological insights not only to the broad political history of West Africa, but also to an understanding of political culture as a form of meaningful social practice.

This volume incorporates historical, ethnographic, art historical, and archaeological sources to examine the relationship between the production of space and political order in the West African Kingdom of Dahomey during the tumultuous Atlantic Era. Dahomey, situated in the modern Republic of Benin, emerged in this period as one of the principle agents in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and an exemplar of West African state formation. Drawing from eight years of ethnohistorical and archaeological fieldwork in the Republic of Benin, the central thesis of this volume is that Dahomean kings used spatial tactics to project power and mitigate dissent across their territories. J. Cameron Monroe argues that these tactics enabled kings to economically exploit their subjects, and to promote a sense of the historical and natural inevitability of royal power."

In this, the 16th issue of The Archaeology of the Clay Tobacco Pipe, the subject matter returns to the east coast of the USA, last visited by the Chesapeake Bay volume (Number XII). A new, extended, typology for Colono pipes is presented, along with a detailed analysis of their chronology. A study of the archaeological evidence at these sites, together with a comparison of the stylistic elements present on the Colono pipes with examples from Mali in West Africa and from elsewhere in the African Diaspora outside North America, strongly supports previous arguments for an African ethnicity for the Chesapeake finds. The author links the increasing social hostility towards Africans in the area, as the century progresses, with changes in the styles observed on the pipes "investing them with...a symbolic content...as a method of communicating cultural survival and ethnic solidarity." The work is of particular significance to prehistorians who lack the means of studying past societies using historical sources.

This volume examines the archaeology of precolonial West African societies in the era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Using historical and archaeological perspectives on landscape, this collection of essays sheds light on how involvement in the commercial revolutions of the early modern period dramatically reshaped the regional contours of political organization across West Africa. The essays examine how social and political transformations occurred at the regional level by exploring regional economic networks, population shifts, cultural values and ideologies. The book demonstrates the importance of anthropological insights not only to the broad political history of West Africa, but also to an understanding of political culture as a form of meaningful social practice.