Shaping Quotidian Worlds: Ceramic Production and Consumption in Banda, Ghana c. 1780–1994

M. das Dores Giaro da Cruz (2003). Ph.D. dissertation, Submitted to the Department of Anthropology, SUNY–Binghamton.

Abstract

The long-standing historical relations between European and West African political powers are well known, as are the changes introduced at a global level by the contact between these societies. The presence of Europeans on the Gold Coast from the 15^th century, the growth of the Asante confederacy during the 17^th–18^th centuries and their control of the flow of European goods to the hinterland markets until 1896, when Asante was integrated in the British colonial empire, are significant political-economic changes well known through historic documents. However, little is known about how the quotidian life of populations changed at the local level due to these major transformations. The main goal of this project is to investigate the impact of broader socio-economic and political events, such as long-distance trade relations, regional conflicts and colonial policies, on patterns of production and consumption in the Gold Coast hinterland during the 19^th and early 20^th century. Ceramics are particularly suitable for this analysis as they are locally produced and are a ubiquitous commodity in archaeological sites. Different spatio-temporal scales of analysis are used to clarify some of the connections between changes at broader and local levels, and the multiple scales of analysis define the use of different sources, with different levels of resolution. To assess the social and the local forces at play in the Banda Area (west-central Ghana) during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, I combine the use of multiple lines of evidence, particularly historic, ethnographic and archaeological sources. Detailed ethnographic work provided rich information regarding socio-economic relations and was used to create a baseline against which archaeological data was analyzed. Ethnoarchaeological research's wealth of detail in contemporary local production became an invaluable source to understand the mechanisms responsible for specialized production, distribution and consumption of locally produced commodities. This research contributes to the ongoing dialogue about socio-economic relations of production and consumption of non-prestige goods, to refining our assumptions about ethnoarchaeological work and the abuse of simple analogy, as well as to our knowledge of Ghana's recent past.

See also: das Dores Cruz, Maria (1996). Ceramic production in the Banda Area (west-central Ghana): An ethnoarchaeological approach. Nyame Akume, 45(1): 30–39.

No abstract available.

Number of samples in dataset: 250

The database file is in Excel format (71K in .zip file). Please fill in the following information to receive the files for this publication.