Neil Norman

Archaeology

Regional focus: Coastal West Africa.

Topical interests: Satellite-aided remote sensing, regional approaches to archaeological survey, urban settlement systems, ethnoarchaeology, and issues of landscape and place.

Coastal West Africa has often been described as the point of embarkation for a massive African diaspora. Between the 16th and 19th centuries from the port of Ouidah alone, about 1 million people were sold into trans-Atlantic enslavement. With such an infamous history the region is often described in terms of a peripheral locale supplying more central nodes in global systems of exchange.

However, with this focus on dispersal into the Atlantic World, the local impact of such world systems goes unaddressed, as do the complexities of regional systems of political, economic, and social exchange. Since 1999, I have conducted research addressing such issues in Bénin, West Africa.

MA Paper: 2003. The Serpent Ditch and the Rainbow: Landscape Politics in Bénin 1650-1850 AD