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 Roots fashions a theory of cultural change that encompasses the diversity of communities, cultures, and forms of expression in Africa and the African diaspora.

Deep Roots, an important and innovative book, pioneers a multidisciplinary methodology, which substantially compensates for the lack of written documentation . . . and archeology data during the formative period of the transatlantic slave trade in Africa.This study is an excellent contribution to the growing literature on food in precolonial Africa. . . . [I]t is a trailblazing work in its innovative amalgamation of archaeological, linguistic, and written source materials.Fields-Black . . . offers important new insights into West African agricultural history and the dynamics of diasporic connections.While Deep Roots is a scholarly endeavor anyone interested in South Carolinas rice history or African history would find it both fascinating and full of interesting facts, stories, illustrations and graphs that bring the story to life.February 18, 2009A stimulating study that deserves attention in graduate seminars . . . in African history . . . and in African diaspora studies. December, 2010An imaginative book . . . The writing is good and the ideas important.

Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas by Judith A. Carney (Harvard University Press, 2002). ISBN 9780674008342.

In fine, Deep Roots represents an important contl-