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This paper explores the connection between ceramic production and dietary changes immediately before, during, and through the decline of the Atlantic trade at Juffure on the Gambia River. The height of the Atlantic trade in the eighteenth century was a period of increased ceramic production and technical experimentation. Simultaneously, there is increase in the diversity of consumption evident in the faunal and botanical remains recovered. This diversity, in both ceramic manufacture and diet, all but disappears with the decline of the Atlantic trade on the river. It is argued that the greater variety observed in ceramic manufacture during the height of the Atlantic trade is related to social practices of display associated with food. This is accomplished through a comparison of everyday and special events composed of displays of food and wealth across ethnic boundaries. These are indicative of different traditions of consumption and discard rather than signaling ethnic differentiation.

The Austronesian settlement of the remote island of Madagascar remains one of the great puzzles of Indo-Pacific prehistory. Although linguistic, ethnographic, and genetic evidence points clearly to a colonization of Madagascar by Austronesian language-speaking people from Island Southeast Asia, decades of archaeological research have failed to locate evidence for a Southeast Asian signature in the island's early material record. Here, we present new archaeobotanical data that show that Southeast Asian settlers brought Asian crops with them when they settled in Africa. These crops provide the first, to our knowledge, reliable archaeological window into the Southeast Asian colonization of Madagascar. They additionally suggest that initial Southeast Asian settlement in Africa was not limited to Madagascar, but also extended to the Comoros. Archaeobotanical data may support a model of indirect Austronesian colonization of Madagascar from the Comoros and/or elsewhere in eastern Africa.

Prior to Arab and European imperialism, the farmers of eastern Africa's Swahili coast engaged in a mixed economy, including fishing, animal husbandry and trade in the Indian Ocean's early global economy. This trade network also exposed eastern Africans to new Asian foodways. Botanical data from archaeological sites on northern Pemba Island, Tanzania, show that ancient Pembans first relied heavily on pearl millet, but subsequently became specialized producers of cotton and the Asian crops rice and coconut during the growth of the trading town of Chwaka. This turn towards Asian foodways, particularly rice, was part of a broader alignment with Indian Ocean cultures during a period of urbanization and Islamization along Africa's eastern coast between the eleventh and the fifteenth centuries. Rice specialization was risky due to the constraints of suitable land, rainfall, and labour supply, and it is likely that social and political rewards compelled this agricultural innovation.

This book tells the story of how Libreville, the colonial and present-day capital of the central African nation of Gabon, came to be reliant upon costly food imports to feed its citizens, French an...

This paper presents the results of a consensus-driven process identifying 50 priority research questions for historical ecology obtained through crowdsourcing, literature reviews, and in-person workshopping. A deliberative approach was designed to maximize discussion and debate with defined outcomes. Two in-person workshops (in Sweden and Canada) over the course of two years and online discussions were peer facilitated to define specific key questions for historical ecology from anthropological and archaeological perspectives. The aim of this research is to showcase the variety of questions that reflect the broad scope for historical-ecological research trajectories across scientific disciplines. Historical ecology encompasses research concerned with decadal, centennial, and millennial human-environmental interactions, and the consequences that those relationships have in the formation of contemporary landscapes. Six interrelated themes arose from our consensus-building workshop model: (1) climate and environmental change and variability; (2) multi-scalar, multi-disciplinary; (3) biodiversity and community ecology; (4) resource and environmental management and governance; (5) methods and applications; and (6) communication and policy. The 50 questions represented by these themes highlight meaningful trends in historical ecology that distill the field down to three explicit findings. First, historical ecology is fundamentally an applied research program. Second, this program seeks to understand long-term human-environment interactions with a focus on avoiding, mitigating, and reversing adverse ecological effects. Third, historical ecology is part of convergent trends toward transdisciplinary research science, which erodes scientific boundaries between the cultural and natural.