Updated Abstract for Award #1041948 Under the direction of Dr. Carla Sinopoli, Amanda Logan will conduct archaeological research in the Banda region of west central Ghana. Previous and ongoing work in the area under the direction of Dr. Ann B. Stahl has documented several shifts over the last millennium AD as Banda became increasingly entangled in the global system. Major political economic changes include a reorientation of long-distance trade from across the Sahara to the Atlantic, takeover by the Asante and British empires, and the transition to market economies, each of which exposed people to a variety of new crops and subsistence practices. Logan will investigate how people incorporated new crops into daily practice during each of these shifts in political economy by documenting 1) the processes by which new crops and accompanying techniques were incorporated, 2) the rate and extent of such changes, and 3) whether or not they correlate with shifts in political economic and environmental conditions. Beginning with an ethnoarchaeological study of food change within living memory that Logan conducted in 2009, she will move backwards in time, mapping change and continuity in food practices in order to reconstruct "genealogies" or histories of food practice. Ethnographic interviews will be linked with longer records of change from four archaeological sites excavated as part of the long term Banda Research Project, which delineate the political economic backdrop from ca. AD 1000-1920, and provide archaeobotanical samples from comparable contexts. Recent methodological developments in paleoethnobotany provide the means to trace food processing practices over time, allowing for an examination of food change as an historical social process. Funds are provided to support analysis of archaeobotanical remains (macro-remains, phytoliths, starch grains, and charcoal) and thermoluminescence dates. This research will contribute to anthropological and archaeological discussions surrounding the nature of subsistence change by looking at how new foods are recontextualized at the local level. This is important because food is not only an essential element for human survival but it also provides an archaeological marker to trace how societies are altered and how they adapt to new cultural influences. It provides a window into understanding why some new influences are accepted, others rejected, and some modified to fit into a new cultural milieu. Because of the successive series of external contacts and their extremely varied nature Banda provides an excellent geographical region for such research. The issue is relevant in many developing regions of the world today whose food systems have been and are being impacted by global pressures, and thus the research has potential application to present day issues. The results will potentially be useful to development agencies, who express concern for long-term affects and directions of subsistence change and the relationship to political and environmental pressures.
Under the direction of Dr. Carla Sinopoli (University of Michigan), Dr. Amanda Logan (then doctoral student at University of Michigan, now at Northwestern University) investigated changes in foodways in Banda, a region in west-central Ghana, from AD 1000-1920s. During this time frame, the Banda area was part of many shifts in local and global political economies that included involvement in the trans-Saharan trade (c. 1250 onwards), the Atlantic trade (c. 1500s/1600s onward), takeover by the Asante state (beginning c. 1770s), and the imposition of British colonial rule (from 1890s to 1957). Over the same time frame, there have been significant shifts in precipitation, including two periods of prolonged drought, from c. AD 1000-1250 and 1450-1650. Building on the long-term archaeological research of Dr. Ann Stahl (University of Victoria), Logan investigated change and continuity in plant foods during each of these political economic and environmental shifts to see how these different pressures impacted foodways. Logan’s results showed three important patterns that have implications beyond archaeology. First, people in the area relied on indigenous grains pearl millet, and to a lesser degree sorghum, for much of the last millennium, even after the arrival of the fast-producing and high-yielding crop maize from the Americas c. AD 1550-1650, suggesting that local preferences for familiar foods were more important than yield, at least at first. Second, people appeared to have weathered a severe, centuries-long drought from c. AD 1450-1650, without significant changes to the crops grown, and showing no evidence for reliance on famine foods, both of which suggest that the drought had little adverse impact on foodways. In contrast, Banda farmers today are much less equipped to cope with a much shorter and less pronounced drought that has occurred in the last 40 years, which has had significant negative impacts on food and agriculture, as well as the economic well-being of families in the area. Third, chronic food shortage seems to have emerged relatively late, beginning in the 19th century, as indicated by the switch to maize and cassava, which requires little labor for its production, as well as the increased use of wild foods. Combined, these results suggest that there has been a reduction in resilience to environmental change as a result of shifting global economies, which challenges the common misconception that African foodways are unchanging traditions plagued by chronic food insecurity and forever subject to the vagaries of environmental change.
