Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2015 - Social & Behavioral Sciences — Anthropology — African and African American Studies

This book marks an important advance in research on the archaeology of the black Atlantic; that is, the archaeological study of contacts, parallelisms, and ruptures that marked Old and New World communities during the era of the Atlantic slave trade.  Until quite recently, New World and Old World archaeologies involved entirely separate research traditions, but works such as this one bridge that gap.  For the most part, research on ritual activities on both sides of the Atlantic has focused on rare and visually striking resemblances, without a great deal of concern for cultural contexts.  Significantly, this book thus involves contributions from both Africa and the Americas and connects evidence for ritual (often, rituals of dislocation and resistance) during the slave trade era among Africans and people of African descent, with rituals of memorialization and commemoration in more recent periods.  Contributors are notably careful in making sophisticated connections between archaeological traces and ritual activities that were often violently suppressed by ruling groups.  Historical sources are well integrated with archaeological data, and the consideration of the influence of these rituals on non-African (including slave-owning) communities is a notable advance.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.