Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora [Paperback]

Mangrove rice farming on West Africa's Rice Coast was the mirror image of tidewater rice plantations worked by enslaved Africans in 18th-century South Carolina and Georgia. This book reconstructs the development of rice-growing technology among the Baga and Nalu of coastal Guinea, beginning more than a millennium before the transatlantic slave trade. It reveals a picture of dynamic pre-colonial coastal societies, quite unlike the static, homogenous pre-modern Africa of previous scholarship. From its examination of inheritance, innovation, and borrowing,Deep Rootsfashions a theory of cultural change that encompasses the diversity of communities, cultures, and forms of expression in Africa and the African diaspora.

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Fields-Black (history, Carnegie-Mellon Univ.) digs out key periods in the technological history of West Africa's coastal littoral by focusing on historical linguistics and tracing environmentally specific knowledge and its use in tidewater rice farming. Despite the potentially esoteric focus on the precolonial (first millennium) history of a sub-region of West Africa and the use of specialist methodologies, Fields-Black manages to make her research and its implications accessible to a wider audience. The volume's final chapter on the African diaspora is a bridge between precolonial coastal Africa and the technology of the American South in the slave trade era explored by Judith Carney in Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (CH, Oct'01, 39-0928). Readers will appreciate the book's clarity of expression and revealing discussions of historical analysis and argumentation. The author's interdisciplinary and comparative approaches challenge archaeological theories of diffusion from the inland Niger Delta to the 'rice coast' and sharpen the understanding of technology transfer and dynamic cultural change in the Atlantic era. Summing Up: Recomml