I applaud Richard's article for continuing to move forwards the study of historical archaeology in African contexts. This article seems to fit within an ever-growing dynamic field of historical archaeologists who move easily between the realms of archaeological data, documentary and oral histories (e.g. Dawdy 2008; Voss 2008). As highlighted by Reid and Lane (2004a; see also contributions to Reid and Lane 2004b) it is perhaps better to conceptualize the study of historical archaeology on the African continent as a field of historical archaeologies, where pluralistic theoretical and methodological directions can be attended to, driven by a diversity of locally contextualized research agendas.
Reading through Richard's study of Senegalese Atlantic-era archaeology, one does not get the sense that the archaeology is in any major way driven by research questions that are drawn from the wider discussions of African diaspora archaeology (Fennell 2007; Ogundiran and Falola 2007; Singleton 1995), as has been the case with much work examining West African historical archaeology (e.g. DeCorse 2001a; pace Stahl 2002). No picture emerges from this work of research that has been concerned with fleshing out analogies and starting points for those interested in interpreting African diasporic contexts in the Americas. The questions upon which Richard focuses his work, particularly the idea of the particularities of the specific trajectories and realms through which the Siin was drawn into wider Atlantic economies and commodity exchanges, are focused upon themes of history within this regional context and the African continent as a whole.
The manner in which this discussion draws out of wider debates in African anthropology and history is one of its strengths. Yet there are some wider issues upon which African historical archaeologists, historians and anthropologists have focused which I think Richard could address with some further discussion. One of the stated aims of this article is ‘making alternative histories’. Interestingly, this same phrase has been used as the title for a volume (Schmidt and Patterson 1995) which takes a similar stance, but attempts to foreground the voices of communities at and around the sites of archaeological research, a theme echoed in the work of many scholars working in this field in Africa interested in issues of praxis (Schmidt 2006; Schmidt and Walz 2007; Shepherd 2002). At times, Richard mentions the use of oral histories in his work. Yet the voices of any residents of the Siin region seem absent from Richard's writing, which instead seems directed by larger themes of economy, issues of social hierarchies, and questions of colonial histories. Since it seems that Richard has engaged with local communities in the course of his research, it would be interesting to see if it would be possible to intertwine some of the perspectives of contemporary residents of the Siin region into the archaeological interpretations. I should also note that I make this comment having been pushed in this direction myself by a similar critique (Shepard, personal communication).
As the Siin residents of the Atlantic era are discussed in Richard's work, I wanted to hear a little more in relation to finer-grained social distinctions in operation within the Siin region. The interpretations made by Richard clearly showed that there were obvious disparities between Siin residents in terms of social status and wealth, with these two positions of power generally subsumed together. The Siin, from the 15th century through to the 19th, was obviously occupied by a stratified society, in which access to imported goods may have, in many ways, been surprisingly egalitarian – certainly from the point of view of those used to an easy equation between wealth, access to commodities and status. The almost democratic ability of many Africans to obtain imported trade goods, with a desire by elites to attempt to control only very specific material goods, seems to potentially echo the situation found in other regions of Africa as more and more Africans participated in Atlantic and other international trade (Kelly 2001; Burke 1996). This generalized picture of large numbers of Africans potentially becoming consumers in a specifically modern sense of the word is of import to the global study of consumption in general. It is an area in which historical archaeologists may be at the forefront of contributing new data outside traditional historical sources, thus extending and adding nuance to current debates on this topic.
Concomitant with a general study of the uneven and sometimes unexpected trajectories of consumerism within the continent of Africa, many authors have paid careful attention to the way in which a diversity of subject positions played into access to and symbolic uses of imported goods. On Zanzibar, for instance, enslaved and formerly enslaved residents of the islands specifically utilized imported clothing and accessories to enact their desired position as fully recognized members of Zanzibari society (Fair 1998; Prestholdt 2008). Many of these patterns of consumption were also intimately intertwined with gendered identities, and those which might sometimes be relationally constructed through sexual relations (Fair 2004; Hansen 2003; McCurdy 2006; Stahl and Cruz 1998).
The specifics of consumer goods have also been recognized as important for their potential symbolic meanings and for the manner in which they can be utilized in practices of consumption. Clothing (Fair 2004; Hansen 2000) may have had very different symbolic meanings and practical uses than did beads (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006), pipes (Stahl 2002) or alcohol (Akyeampong 1996; Willis 2002). Richard wants us to consider the goods found at sites in the Siin region as ‘compositions’ of artefacts, an approach which he argues can better enable us to understand specifically African regimes of value. Such attempted holism seems to offer great potential for doing precisely as Richard suggests. But I feel it is undermined by the scant attention paid to the locally produced ceramics, which we are told amount to over 90 per cent of the total excavated material. This pattern matches many other African period sites (Croucher 2007; Croucher and Wynne-Jones 2006; Stahl 2007), although it contrasts with many other contexts of historical archaeology. Even at sites in America where locally produced ceramics are present on colonial sites, by the later 18th century these seldom come close to matching the proportions of material we face within African contexts. A specifically African historical archaeological approach, then, needs to address this massive category of material culture which was surely a central part of African regimes of value. Richard mentions local bead and fabric production, but local ceramics also provide potential routes to understand local tastes at a variety of levels, along with strength in local craft production in relation to increased international imports (e.g. Gosselain 1999; 2000; Lyons 2007; Stahl and Cruz 1998). An interpretation which stresses the importance of taking goods together as elements of compositional trading practices must also recognize the compositional nature of daily material lives. It is easy to fall back on the manifests of trade goods that were bought and sold in West Africa, but these manifests were likely not the same compositions of goods that were meaningful to the majority of Siin residents away from trading stations. A strength of historical archaeology is that we have the ability to draw together materials that do and do not make it into documentary sources, yet Richard seems to let local foodways-related material culture drop from his frame of analysis with no satisfactory explanation as to why this is the case.
In contrast to this critique levelled at the selective nature of Richard's composition of artefactual analysis, I also think that some problems exist in the lack of engagement with studies that have foregrounded particular commodities in order to understand their specific histories for African consumers, along with these same consumers’ impacts within transnational networks of commodity flows. Attending to the particular meanings of singular commodities or goods opens up potentials for engaging with the material qualities of artefacts outside their place in compositional schemes. An important strand in the study of commodities in the contemporary world is increasingly attuned to their materiality (Jackson 2004, 172). Even as trade goods had to be put together in particular compositions for successful trading, the specific material qualities of goods were also vital to their inclusion within new material regimes of trade and modernity (Burke 1996; Prestholdt 2008; Taussig 2009). Richard brings up the potential importance of the materiality of some of the trade goods he interprets, particularly the relation of the qualities of imported beads in comparison with locally produced beads. Such important discussions must also be predicated on the fact that commodities were not only meaningful in compositional groupings. Instead, particular qualities of goods often laid down genealogies that made for specific paths through local regimes of value, use, exchange and meaning within colonial transactions (Thomas 1991).
Alcohol, particularly as imported spirits, has been a singular category of analysis for some West African historians (Akyeampong 1996; Van den Bersselaar 2007; see also Willis 2002 for East Africa). These histories have shown that alcohol was often ‘domesticated’ within West African contexts, coming to take on specific local meanings, and that in some cases alcohol was even decommodified by chiefs as it moved from international networks of commodity trade to local contexts of practice (Akyeampong 1996, 15). Richard reads European commentary on alcohol use in the Siin region combined with high incidences of alcohol bottles across wealth divides to argue that alcoholism was ‘a social pathology that intensified to the beat of global flows’ (p. 14). I do not wish to sidestep the realities of alcohol abuse, which have continued in West Africa to the present day, particularly for urban migrants (Akyeampong 1996, 71). However, seemingly excessive alcohol consumption elsewhere in colonial West Africa had complex social meanings. It was often an area for the specific contestation of power relations between groups of men, with women excluded from alcohol consumption. It could be the expression of royal largesse through the distribution of alcohol in a generous manner, as well as a central part of public rituals that could ‘service’ local inequalities, set against potential instability bought about by increasing participation in modern Atlantic worlds (Akyeampong 1996). This type of historical account stresses the local emic meaning of a commodity, which may have often been markedly different from the perceived meanings of European commentators. In thinking of local regimes of value it is vital to probe as deeply as possible into potential historical discussions that relate to local practices within various regions of Africa. If alcohol may have been decommodified within many of its contexts of use, what does this mean for its relation to other goods bought by Siin residents through commodity markets? We might also question how women's positions may have changed if alcohol, specifically tied to men (and I make this comment on a purely speculative basis in relation to Akyeampong's study in a different region), became central to feasting rituals in the Siin that were used to reinforce power – did this act to close women out of structures of power? I find it notable that Sarkozy's speech refers specifically to the universal masculine African subject. Rather than only writing ‘the African man’ into nuanced historical archaeologies of Africa, we can attempt to explore a range of Africans, who were positioned in diverse gender, status, ethnic and other subject positions – the recognition of which may also aid in moving us away from the type of homogeneous history of the continent imagined by Sarkozy and many others like him.
In line with many other regions studied by historians and anthropologists, scholarship on the African continent has recently begun to take something of a ‘consumerist’ turn (Burke 1996; Hansen 2000; Prestholdt 2008; Van den Bersselaar 2007). These types of history seem also to offer the potential to reconfigure the historical space, as Richard is interested in doing. My final comment on this article would be to question whether this seems to be a useful perspective to apply in any way to the Siin region. The ambiguous terrain of Senegambian history which Richard's research helps to illuminate seems partially to be one in which Africans increasingly began to define their lives through the acquisition and use of commoditized goods. Such a step seems an important one in understanding the trajectories of modernity within this particular region.
Overall, Richard's article provides rich territory on which to begin to debate and explore the widening field of African historical archaeology. His work demonstrates the potential that archaeologists have to be at the forefront of some historical study on the continent. This work should be congratulated for its thought-provoking depth in making us reconsider the place of the Siin within the Atlantic world through specifically archaeological perspectives.
