Date of Award

5-10-2026

Date Published

June 2026

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Anthropology

Advisor(s)

Christopher DeCorse

Keywords

Bunce Island;Foodways;Sierra Leone;TransAtlantic Trade;West African Coast

Abstract

In this dissertation, I investigate foodways at Bunce Island Fort, Sierra Leone, a British Atlantic trading emporium operational from the 1670s to the 1850s. While the large-scale economics, demographics, and infrastructure of the trans-Atlantic slave trade have received extensive scholarly attention, the quotidian activities that underpinned the system, particularly on the West African coast, remain understudied. In this dissertation I demonstrate the Bunce Island European garrison’s provisioning through wide ranging terrestrial and maritime trade networks. By examining food practices through a multi-scalar, interdisciplinary lens, I demonstrate that seemingly mundane daily activities sustained the grand trans-Atlantic system. I draw on archaeological materials from Christopher DeCorse’s Archaeological Investigation of the Sierra Leone Estuary (AISLE) project, integrating faunal remains (n = 2,884 specimens), ceramics (669 minimum vessel counts), glass (749 food-related fragments), and metal artifacts from two primary loci: the Merchant Quarters and the South Bastion. I use faunal morphological and isotopic analyses, employing stable carbon (δ¹³C), nitrogen (δ¹⁵N), sulfur (δ³⁴S), and strontium (⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr) isotopes, combined with ceramic, glass, and metal analyses, alongside archival records and travel accounts, to reconstruct foodways across the entire chaîne opératoire from conceptualization through discard. Theoretically, I integrate Pierre Bourdieu’s practice theory (habitus, field, capital, and doxa) as modified by Sherry Ortner’s emphasis on distributed power and multiple agencies, with Wallerstein’s World-Systems Analysis to connect micro-historical findings to macro-scale Atlantic structures. This integration enables analysis across scales, from intimate domestic negotiations over daily meals to the continental-spanning networks these negotiations sustained. The approach challenges Eurocentric historiography by revealing that power in Atlantic contexts was distributed and negotiated rather than simply imposed. Key findings demonstrate conclusively that Bunce Island Fort’s provisioning was overwhelmingly African. Strontium isotope ratios (0.7114–0.7177) and carbon isotope values (δ¹³C averaging −7.99‰) confirm that cattle, the dominant taxon at 52.34% NISP in the Merchant Quarters and 44.75% in the South Bastion, originated from West African interior regions spanning Sierra Leone to Gambia, transported via local and regional state networks. These animals were processed using African-style cutlass butchery rather than British saw-based techniques, and cut to a mean fragment size of 4.4 centimeters suitable for pot-stewing rather than roasting. The near-total absence of pig remains (0.04% NISP) despite British working-class dependence on pork suggests African influence over protein sourcing, likely influenced by Islamic dietary preferences embedded in Sierra Leone culture before the Atlantic trade. The ceramic assemblage, entirely British in origin, consists of creamware, pearlware, whiteware, Rhenish stoneware, and delftware. It reveals a bowl-to-plate ratio of approximately 4:1 across both loci (92 bowls versus 32 plates in the Merchant Quarters; 100 versus 20 in the South Bastion). This materializes African influence over meal structures: African women’s habitus, oriented toward rice and soup-based dishes served in bowls, shaped not only what food looked like on the table but what it was. The near-complete absence of British cooking equipment like roasting spits, trivets, baking implements, despite two centuries of continuous occupation constitutes what I term the “invisible kitchen,” a material silence that paradoxically makes visible the practical authority African women exercised over food preparation. The glass assemblage (predominantly dark green free-blown wine and beer bottles from Bristol and London manufactories) confirms British control over alcohol provisioning and the persistence of British drinking culture, even as food preparation and sourcing followed African patterns. Synthesizing across the foodways chaîne opératoire, I argue that Bunce Island Fort’s foodways constituted entangled negotiations rather than simple British imposition, African resistance, or equal-partnership hybridity. British merchants possessed economic capital and formal authority but lacked the social networks, cultural knowledge, and material resources necessary to reproduce British foodways in West Africa. African women possessed social capital through kinship ties to chiefs controlling provisioning routes, cultural capital through mastery of local food systems, and practical authority over daily domestic operations, but lacked formal power within the fort’s commercial hierarchy. Neither group could fully impose its doxa. The resulting food practices, African-sourced and African-prepared food served in British ceramic vessels, consumed mostly by hand, emerged from sustained accommodation between interdependent actors navigating complementary forms of capital. This dissertation makes several interdisciplinary contributions. It expands the zooarchaeological database for the Sierra Leone region, providing isotopic and morphological data for future faunal studies. It advances methodological conversations by demonstrating that integrating stable isotope analysis, zooarchaeology, and artifact analysis with archival records enables the reconstruction of provisioning networks otherwise invisible in written records. Theoretically, it demonstrates practice theory’s utility for interpreting culture contact in Atlantic contexts, particularly Ortner’s emphasis on multiple agencies and distributed power. Historiographically, it challenges narratives centering European agency in Atlantic commerce by demonstrating that African women’s labor, knowledge, and kinship networks were constitutive, not peripheral, to the operation of a major British slave-trading emporium. In doing so, the dissertation contributes to decolonial approaches to Atlantic history, making visible the historically invisible agency of those whose work sustained the trade that has defined so much of the modern world.

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