The comments of Nicholas Sarkozy provide a powerful and forceful opening to Dr Richard's article and remind us of the potential significance of academic considerations of colonial legacies in the contemporary world. Dr Richard argues strongly against static conceptualizations of pre-‘Atlantic-era’ Africa and seeks to recast Africans not as victims, but as active ‘producers of history and culture’ (p. 26). In so doing he aligns himself with current trends in critical scholarship on colonial encounters in the Atlantic worlds of the last four centuries, scholarship that overtly criticizes dichotomous understandings of such encounters in favour of approaches that emphasize ambiguity (e.g. Hall 2000; Silliman 2001; 2009; Stahl 2007). Dr Richard's introductory suggestion that we should formulate ‘new questions instead of supplying different answers to the quandaries of an earlier generation of historians’ (p. 3) is clearly applicable to studies of colonial arenas beyond West Africa. In all parts of the world touched by European colonialism (including, of course, Europe itself) the ways in which scholars approach their subjects are very much conditioned by more widely held cultural memories, whatever the relationship of those memories may be to whatever may have occurred in the past.
I am sympathetic to the author's desire to explore how ‘object circulation and appropriation can complicate conventional readings of Atlantic dynamics’ (p. 4) and found the suggestion that ‘we must document the cultural translation of economic encounters before and during the Atlantic era, and the different forms of experience forged in these interactions’ (p. 7) to be entirely sensible as a means to evaluate and interpret object trajectories and systems of value. However, I must admit that I came away from several readings of the article wishing that Dr Richard had spent more time fleshing out the actual object trajectories and rather less time arguing for the need to examine such trajectories. I want very much to believe that archaeology has an integral role to play in re-envisioning African pasts and presents, but I was left uncertain as to whether or not the author personally finds much value in archaeological evidence. Discussions of liquor bottles, beads and cloth were intended to illustrate complexity and agency on the part of the inhabitants of Siin during the ‘Atlantic era’, yet the complete lack of specificity in the discussions robbed the evidence of much of its expostulatory and explanatory power. We are told that a ‘small trench’ was ‘littered with late 19th-century artefacts’, including a ‘dense bottle inventory consisting almost exclusively of wine and demijohn bottle fragments’ (p. 15), but this is a meaningless description. How small is small? What is a dense inventory?
We are then informed that Venetian and Czech beads are an ‘omnipresence’ (p. 17) and a ‘ubiquitous presence’ (p. 13) on historic settlements, while an assemblage of only a ‘small nature’ (p. 18) of locally made beads is known. In discussing cloth production, we are expected to accept the author's judgement that its ‘cultural significance unfortunately lies beyond archaeological interpretation’ (p. 19) as there exists only ‘a very small collection of highly variable spindle whorls scattered across the region’ (p. 19). Such vague descriptions hinder substantive considerations of meaning and materiality. While I found the argument about the presence of differential social practices linked to the choice of alcohol products a compelling proposition that intersects well with understandings of the role of alcohol in other colonial spaces (eg. Dietler 2006; Smith 2006; 2008), it was difficult to evaluate the interpretation without a clearer sense of the evidence.
More serious than any latent data fascism on my part is a concern that in downplaying the specificity and therefore the significance of material evidence, the author inadvertently risks supporting, rather than refuting, Sarkozy's version of a static, oppressed Africa with no history of its own. Statements such as the following could be read as implying that the people of Siin were in fact passive victims of global forces beyond their control: Dutch ‘products inundated African overseas markets’ (p. 13), alcohol abuse was a ‘social pathology that intensified to the beat of global flows’ (p. 14), and ‘the liquor trade indubitably eroded the local social fabric’ (p. 15). This is unfortunate, as I am certain that the author did not intend or anticipate such a reading. The discussion of drinking practices and the multivalent uses of alcohol provides a critical and more ‘nuanced’ perspective on social hierarchies and the ways in which non-local products intersect with local realities. But despite emphasizing the need to understand ‘economic encounters before and during the Atlantic era’ (p. 7) the author provides very little information about earlier practices. I would suggest that shipping records prior to the mass circulation of glass vessels in the 18th and 19th centuries would be a useful place to start to quantify alcohol imports, given that wine as well as spirits was typically shipped in casks and barrels.
The need to tease out the meaning of alcohol and associated social practice prior to the introduction of new products and practices speaks directly to me in terms of my own work in trying to understand the intersection of Gaelic and English drinking customs in late 16th- and early 17th-century Ireland (Horning 2009). In that colonial setting, the cultural contexts of alcohol consumption were outwardly similar, yet the high percentage of instances of violence occurring in spaces of cross-cultural consumption suggests that, following Bhabha (1994), meanings were routinely misunderstood and signs misappropriated. The archaeological signature of such encounters rests not so much in primary evidence for shipping containers or production sites, although such evidence does exist, but in the physical and recorded evidence of related activities, including assemblages related to hospitality and feasting. While the intangibles of social practices are inherently difficult to read archaeologically, I remain convinced that it is possible to extract meaning from even the smallest of assemblages. I empathize with the author's apparent frustration at the dearth of available evidence from the Siin region, but I would urge him to take what does exist more seriously. There should still be a place for the quantification of bottle glass fragments and charcoal spreads in the kind of thoughtful and theoretically sophisticated studies of colonial entanglements otherwise exemplified by Dr Richard's research. I accept that such data may well exist in the author's Ph.D. thesis (Richard 2007) but its invisibility in this article is troubling.
Moving away from contemplating the contributions (or lack thereof?) of field archaeology to understanding the ways in which the people of Siin engaged with European goods, I would like to return to the broader issue of the impact of the present on formulations of the past. As previously stated, I wholeheartedly agree with the desire to step outside remembered colonial histories and remembered colonial dichotomies in favour of an approach that, in the author's words, ‘rearticulates . . . the relationship between our historical imaginations and the present and future with which they converse’ (p. 25). Despite this statement, I was left wondering exactly how the author sees this new approach to African histories, one which challenges a ‘narrative of melancholia and betrayal, underwritten by a deep nostalgia for a once authentic Africa’ (p. 25), playing out beyond academia. Or, put differently, who is the audience for this critique? For all the emphasis upon acknowledging African histories and agencies, I struggled to hear many African voices in the telling.
Perhaps Mark Pluciennik (2009, 153) was correct when he recently wrote in this journal that archaeology ‘is neither particularly useful nor necessary, but it is intellectual fun’, yet for archaeologists dealing with the still suppurating wounds of colonial pasts there would seem to be other imperatives than just having a good time. Dr Richard assigns a seriousness of purpose to his recasting (reclamation?) of Siin history when he references the present and the future, yet leaves out the detail. I cannot help but be curious about how a de-emphasis on the slave trade in recognition of Senegal's rather more complicated Atlantic-era experience might interface with the economic realities of ‘roots’ tourism (Bruner 1996; Handley 2006; Osei-Tutu 2007). I do not expect a simple answer, but when we begin to cage our discussions of the past with explicit references to the present, as exemplified by the use of the Sarkozy quotation as a framing device, then it would seem to me that we have to be explicit about our own positionality and the potential consequences of our statements. Perhaps a return to those ambiguous ‘small trenches’ of Siin, accompanied by the contemporary inhabitants, would create a space for recognizing the multiple perspectives of the present while unearthing the physical traces of similarly multivalent perspectives from the past.
