The Archaeology of the Transatlantic Trade in Peki, Ghana: Local Responses to Global Encounters in Atlantic West Africa

Abstract Archaeological studies of the transatlantic slave trade in West Africa have traditionally focused on coastal and discrete sites of slavery, leaving interior communities comparatively underexplored. This paper advances methodological frameworks for the archaeology of transatlantic trade that move beyond the search for direct material signatures of enslavement to examine the circulation, appropriation, social valuation, and consumption of imported trade goods, and how they shaped political and economic landscapes in Peki, an Ewe-speaking polity in southeastern Ghana. Drawing on archaeological data from sacred sites, burial contexts, and domestic middens, complemented by oral traditions and historical sources, we examine how participation in the Atlantic trade reshaped political authority, consumption practices, and everyday life between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Archaeological materials from Peki, including liquor bottles, tobacco pipes, and European ceramics, demonstrate a shift from elite-controlled access to broader community consumption during the nineteenth century, coinciding with the transition from slave trading to “legitimate commerce.” By situating local material practices in Peki within wider Atlantic political economies, the paper shows how inland African communities actively navigated global economic forces and suggests that the Peki community be regarded as an important node in the network of places connected to heritage tourism and the UNESCO Slave Routes Projects related to the transatlantic trade in Ghana.