Materialities of Earthwork Cultural Landscapes in the Black Atlantic: Technologies, Architectures, and Cosmologies

Session Submission Type: Panel

Description for Program

The anthropogenic earthworks of Africa and the diaspora – some of the largest structures on earth – are testament to the ways in which African knowledge and agency transformed maritime and other cultural landscapes in the New World, often on a massive scale. Such earthworks included linear bank and ditch boundaries, moats, mounds, agricultural irrigation features, and canals, regularly representing a convergence of African architectural, technological, and cosmological knowledge with that of Indigenous American and European groups. Various West and Central African societies were adept in the creation of linear earthwork fortifications, canals and canoe ports that connected swampland riverine landscapes, and complex agricultural engineering key in the creation of waterlogged rice-growing landscapes. Such architectural and engineering knowledge, coupled with evolving concepts and cosmologies associated with some of these structures and landscapes, was transferred to the Americas during the era of the Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans. Cross-disciplinary research by historians, archaeologists, and others has provided transformative insights into the contribution of African societies to the physical cultural landscapes of the Americas – from the role of the knowledge of enslaved people in developing colonial rice agriculture in the US to the use of linear earthwork fortifications as a form of resistance among African maroon communities in South America and the Caribbean. To improve scholarly understanding of how diasporic communities constructed, used, and understood these cultural landscapes, there is scope for further comparative conversations between researchers studying materialities of African, African diasporic, Indigenous, and European earthwork technologies in the Americas and in Africa. This panel thus explores novel research across disciplines into the materiality of earthworks and concepts of landscape on both sides of the Atlantic as a means of further investigating the role of African knowledge systems, and their convergence with others, in profoundly influencing the landscape history of the Americas.

Sub Unit

• ASWAD

Chair

• Neil Norman

Individual Presentations

• Investigating Africa’s Largest Structures: Construction and Cosmologies of African Earthworks, and Comparison with Diasporic Landscapes - Tomos Evans, Washington University in St. Louis

• Reinterpreting Amazonian Earthworks: Emergence of the Black Amazon - Cheryl White, Anton de Kom University of Suriname

• Bound to Land, Bonded through clay: Connecting South Carolina Lowcountry Enslaved African Pottery and Embankments - Andrew Agha

• Race in the Antebellum Landscape: Reframing the Great Dismal Swamp as a Critical Black Geography - Rachel Burke

Discussant

• Tristram Kidder, Washington University in St. Louis