This paper examines how pottery production techniques relate to the development of village communities along the middle Faleme River in eastern Senegambia over the past two millennia. Moving beyond traditional archaeological approaches to ceramics for chronological dating or cultural classification, this research analyzes pottery fabrics as evidence of technical choices that reflect social relationships and interactions among potters. Through petrographic analysis of 116 pottery sherds from eight sites spanning four chronological periods (c. 100-1900 CE), the study identifies seven distinct petrofabrics in the Central Faleme Archaeological Project (CFAP) study area. The analysis focuses on how potters obtained and processed clay, particularly their manipulation of aplastic inclusions through techniques such as selection, tempering, and sieving. Drawing on local geological data and ethnoarchaeological insights, the research uses variations in ceramic fabrics to reveal patterns of technical choice that materialize relationships between potters and broader social networks. These patterns suggest that village communities along the Faleme River were shaped by at least two waves of immigration and subsequent assimilation over the past 1000 years. This study contributes to a growing body of archaeological research exploring how detailed technical analysis of pottery production can reveal histories of social interaction at multiple scales.

Strontium isotope (87Sr/86Sr) analysis with reference to strontium isotope landscapes (Sr isoscapes) allows reconstructing mobility and migration in archaeology, ecology, and forensics. However, despite the vast potential of research involving 87Sr/86Sr analysis particularly in Africa, Sr isoscapes remain unavailable for the largest parts of the continent. Here, we measure the 87Sr/86Sr ratios in 778 environmental samples from 24 African countries and combine this data with published data to model a bioavailable Sr isoscape for sub-Saharan Africa using random forest regression. We demonstrate the efficacy of this Sr isoscape, in combination with other lines of evidence, to trace the African roots of individuals from historic slavery contexts, particularly those with highly radiogenic 87Sr/86Sr ratios uncommon in the African Diaspora. Our study provides an extensive African 87Sr/86Sr dataset which includes scientifically marginalized regions of Africa, with significant implications for the archaeology of the transatlantic slave trade, wildlife ecology, conservation, and forensics.

Junaluska is a historically Black community in the southern Appalachian town of Boone, North Carolina. In 2020, we began a collaborative archaeology project with the community-based Junaluska Heritage Association to address two community concerns: (1) identifying unmarked graves at the Clarissa Hill Cemetery and (2) learning more about the nineteenth and early twentieth-century origins of Junaluska. Here we present our ongoing work on these heritage issues, including a survey of local residents, archaeological geophysics and excavation, and public outreach. We argue that community archaeology in Junaluska can be a model for collaborative heritage management and antiracist scholarship elsewhere in the US.

Junaluska is a historically Black community in the southern Appalachian town of Boone, North Carolina. In 2020, we began a collaborative archaeology project with the community-based Junaluska Heritage Association to address two community concerns: (1) identifying unmarked graves at the Clarissa Hill Cemetery and (2) learning more about the nineteenth and early twentieth-century origins of Junaluska. Here we present our ongoing work on these heritage issues, including a survey of local residents, archaeological geophysics and excavation, and public outreach. We argue that community archaeology in Junaluska can be a model for collaborative heritage management and antiracist scholarship elsewhere in the US.

Massive infrastructures of transportation and border security, designed to control flows of people and things, dominate the contemporary US-Mexico border. Together, these material projects work to inscribe the hegemonic processes of neoliberal capitalism and national sovereignty onto the physical landscape and into everyday life, giving them an aura of inevitability and permanence. Using archaeology, we challenge this narrative by exploring the counter-infrastructures developed by marginal communities in the US-Mexico borderlands - including miners, hippies, and migrants - to navigate and/or resist these projects. Specifically, we compare the shifting fields of in/visibility created by infrastructure and counter-infrastructure from the 1880s to the present to emphasize that bordering projects are neither inevitable nor permanent.

The archaeological record of the American Eastern Woodlands has been the subject of research on the origins and organization of complex societies for decades. Much of this research, ultimately grounded in political-economic theories of accumulation, underscores how foraging, horticultural, and agricultural societies manifested complexity in different ways belying their similar signposts of complexity, including monumental architecture, long-distance exchange, and craft specialization. Here, we contend that aspects of these material practices, which span the Late Archaic, Middle Woodland, and Early Mississippian periods, are essential for sketching a historical ontology of social complexity in indigenous eastern North America. Drawing on political-economic theories developed in sub-Saharan Africa, we propose that the deep time ebb and flow of complex social formations in the Eastern Woodlands relied less on the quantitative accumulation of wealth in things and people and more on the qualitative composition of the diverse knowledge embedded in people and things. We discuss Poverty Point, Ohio Hopewell, and Cahokia from this vantage point in an effort to begin telling a “big history” of the Eastern Woodlands outside the frame of social evolution.

The Bandafassi Regional Archaeological Project (BRAP) explores a multiethnic landscape in the upper Gambia River region heavily impacted by slavery. The project assesses discourses of different stakeholders to see what is silenced, acknowledged, centered, and decentered in historical narratives. This article compares if and how slavery is invoked by narrators discussing the Atlantic era history of our study area, a region that today includes the UNESCO World Heritage cultural landscape of Bassari Country. Narratives presented by local guides specializing in tours of specific, ethnic communities emphasize intercommunity or interethnic politics and militarism. Narratives used in applications for and recognition of World Heritage status focused on interethnic ecological complementarities. Archaeological evidence for changes in settlement patterns and defensive architecture highlight the local effects of Atlantic entanglements and slaving on the landscape. BRAP’s work complements other regional narratives by analyzing the politics of the historiography of Atlantic era West Africa.

The study of social space has become a central concern of African archaeology over the past three decades. Responding to critiques of the search for grand narratives (Stahl 1999), many scholars have turned their attention to more synchronic interpretations of social complexity and subjective experience in specific times and places—a move that encourages more critical analyses of socio-spatial relations within sites and across landscapes.

Since the 1990s, US border policies have worked to funnel undocumented migration into remote stretches of the Sonoran Desert, where deadly terrain and temperatures make border crossing most dangerous. This weaponization of the desert finds some cover, we argue, behind the scalar projects of state-centered maps emphasizing vast geography and gross statistics over personal pain and trauma. Counter-mapping against these projects, we draw on archaeological and ethnographic data from the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP), and geospatial data for thousands of deceased migrants across southern Arizona, to witness how migration, as both socio-historical process and humanitarian crisis, emerges from human-scale strategies and experiences of suffering.

3Centre for Battlefield Archaeology University of Glasgow, UK Yoro Moussou sits in a region known historically as (the) Niokolo, a name shared by a local watercourse and a historical Malinké chiefdom (jamano). Historical narratives suggest that the region then evolved into what might be termed a shatter zone at the periphery of Mandé polities (Person 1984), Peul theocracies (Harrison 1988), and Atlantic Era statecraft and slave trade (Carpenter 2012: 72-73). Indeed, oral traditions claim that these latter dynamics led to the construction of Yoro Moussou during a period of great violence in the late nineteenth century. The archaeology of this site illustrates how local defensive strategies intersected with social and political dynamics at play in the Malinké communities of the Niokolo during the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries.

Historical narratives in Upper Senegal largely center on precolonial statecraft, long-distance trade, and ethno-religious mobilization. Drawing on the perspective of political ecology, we examine how these regional processes intersected with village life through local relations to land. Specifically, we chart the long-term dynamics of settlements and their catchments along the Falemme River between the states Gajaaga and Bundu, centered on the Senegal confluence, and a shifting frontier with the non-state societies of Bambuk to the south. This involves first integrating site data from our independent archaeological surveys of the Lower and Middle Falemme study areas into a GIS database for regional analysis of settlements patterns during the second millennium AD. We then compare these patterns with site catchments for surface soils classified from multispectral satellite imagery (Landsat 8 OLI-TIRS) to model everyday access to cultivable land. Our results challenge state-centric narratives of Upper Senegal by suggesting that everyday experiences of village life along the Falemme River were more firmly grounded in local concerns for land and subsistence production than in regional politics of statecraft and frontier.

The view that migrant artifacts and sites trash the fragile ecosystem of the Sonoran Desert can be found across the political spectrum from American border militias and anti-immigrant activists on the far right to humanitarian groups and environmentalists on the far left. By devaluing these objects, if not the people who carry them, this perspective gives rise to conservation efforts to remove all material traces of undocumented migration to landfills. Rather than engaging in tired and cyclical political arguments about whether undocumented migrants are friend or foe, we gaze forward to see how these processes shape the material record of clandestine migration, as a form of heritage, now and in the future. As with those who believed that European immigrants in the 19th century would "contribute little of lasting value" many anti-immigration proponents today consider the material record of border crossing to have no heritage value.

Community Archaeology and Heritage in Africa: Decolonizing Practice. PETER R. SCHMIDT and INNOCENT PIKIRAYI , editors. 2016. Routledge, New York. 324 pp. $44.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-11-3865685-7. - Volume 82 Issue 3

The land of Bambuk was an important source of gold for trans-Saharan trade and the imperial polities of Ghana and Mali, yet the non-centralized societies of this region remain largely peripheral in the historiography of West Africa. Drawing on recent archaeological research at the site of Diouboye in eastern Senegal, this book explores social life in medieval Bambuk from the standpoint of a village occupied over several centuries (1000-1400 CE). Material and spatial data from excavations, together with those from survey of the middle Falemme River basin, enable a critical look at how interactions across multiple scales—among neighboring houses, between cultural and craft traditions, and within a much broader political economy—created both possibilities for and challenges to the ongoing production of a local community at Diouboye. By moving back and forth across these scales centered on a single village, Assembling the Village in Medieval Bambuk outlines a relational archaeology of community applicable to the study of seemingly peripheral societies and processes of pre-modern globalization across Africa and beyond.