Culture contact and change in West Africa

This chapter examines African-European interaction in historical perspective, placing emphasis on variation in the contact setting and the evaluation of culture change in African populations during the period of initial European contact, trade, and colonization. A cognitive perspective is used to evaluate archaeological definition of transformations in African worldviews. Although a general relationship between an expanding Eurocentric economic system and changing artifact inventories is recognized, inferences concerning the alteration of cultural systems is viewed as more tenuous. Acknowledgment of the varied ways in which material remains represent cultures and how changes in shared beliefs or worldviews may be identified archaeologically is seen as germane to archaeology's heuristic. Perception of culture change is evaluated in light of recent research in West Africa.