Amanda Logan | Northwestern University (original) (raw)

Books by Amanda Logan

The Scarcity Slot is the first book to critically examine food security in Africa’s deep past. Am... more The Scarcity Slot is the first book to critically examine food security in Africa’s deep past. Amanda L. Logan argues that African foodways have been viewed through the lens of ‘the scarcity slot,’ a kind of Othering based on presumed differences in resources. Weaving together archaeological, historical, and environmental data with food ethnography, she advances a new approach to building long-term histories of food security on the continent in order to combat these stereotypes. Focusing on a case study in Banda, Ghana that spans the past six centuries, The Scarcity Slot reveals that people thrived during a severe, centuries-long drought just as Europeans arrived on the coast, with a major decline in food security emerging only recently. This narrative radically challenges how we think about African foodways in the past with major implications for the future.

Papers by Amanda Logan

African Archaeological Review, 2023

How can we use the past to help us solve today's urgent climate change concerns? Archaeology prov... more How can we use the past to help us solve today's urgent climate change concerns? Archaeology provides one way forward by providing a longterm view of what worked and what did not work in the past. Indigenous knowledge systems have long curated a range of survival strategies that provide powerful inspiration for thinking differently about sustainability. Inspired by Africanfuturism-or how writers of African descent have creatively reimagined Black futures-we explore how creative writing can mobilize the past to rethink climate change responses. We have designed this piece for use in middle and secondary school science, history, or literature classes. An introductory explanation and "what we know" sections provide teachers with the necessary framing and background knowledge. The two short stories could be assigned to 13-18-year-old students to illustrate the kind of reimagining they might pursue based on archaeological and oral historical information.

African Archaeological Review, 2019

This edited forum includes 6 short pieces by 5 different contributors: 1. Critically Engaging Afr... more This edited forum includes 6 short pieces by 5 different contributors:
1. Critically Engaging African Food Security and Usable Pasts Through Archaeology: Amanda Logan
2. Why Centennial-Scale Data Is Relevant to Modern Food Security in Africa and Why Applying Long-Term Insights Requires a Methodology of its Own: Daryl Stump
3. “Infrastructures” of Pre-Colonial Food Security in Eastern Africa: Steven Goldstein
4. Long-Term Histories of Tiv Agriculture and Their Implications for Food Security and Sustainability Today: Emuobosa Orijemie
5. Food Sovereignty in Africa’s Past Holds Lessons for African Futures: Amanda Logan
6. Looking Back and Thinking Forward: A Usable Archeology of Garden-Based Farming in South Africa in a Time of Land Grabs: M.H. Schoeman

For full text, go to: http://rdcu.be/qq3G Despite recent emphases on both environmental archae... more For full text, go to: http://rdcu.be/qq3G

Despite recent emphases on both environmental archaeology and practice theory in archaeology, the two are rarely combined. In this paper, we illustrate a genealogies of environmental practice approach that seeks to understand how human actions grounded in familiar repertoires make sense of environmental and political economic change. Employing archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological data, we first examine taxon-specific genealogies of practice and then compare them to one another as well as to broader climatic, political, and economic contexts of the last millennium in Banda, west central Ghana. In focusing on the interactivities between different kinds of data, we coax out the strategies used by Banda's inhabitants to cope with fluctuating environmental and political conditions. We argue that during a several centuries long drought in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries AD, Banda villagers took advantage of a diverse set of economic activities to cope with turbulence, but by the late nineteenth century, these opportunities had dwindled, diminishing the villagers' practical options.

Today, food insecurity is associated with both severe climatic shifts and pervasive poverty. What... more Today, food insecurity is associated with both severe climatic shifts and pervasive poverty. What is less well understood is how the problem of hunger came to take its present-day form, especially in the African continent, where the highest prevalence of undernourishment is found. In this article, I propose that archaeology can be used as an alternative archive of food security. Material remains provide a from-the-hearth-up view of changing foodways and political economy and can be used to trace the shape of processes that led to modern-day patterns of food insecurity. Combining archaeobotanical, ethnoarchaeological, and environmental data, I provide a case study that shows how food insecurity was avoided during a centuries-long drought in Banda, Ghana, and emerged only much later, in the 19th and 20th centuries, as market economies and colonial rule took hold. I suggest that archaeology is essential for making such processes of “slow violence” visible, particularly in areas that lack rich historical archives. [Africa, food security, Ghana, archaeobotany, slow violence]

Food security is an all-inclusive concept, with a lack of access to sufficient food on one end of... more Food security is an all-inclusive concept, with a lack of access to sufficient food on one end of the spectrum and access to plentiful, desirable foods on the other. Archaeology's long-term perspective allows us to trace contexts in which food insecurity emerged by investigating the pillars of food security outlined by the World Health Organization (WHO): food availability, access, use, and preference. Using these criteria, I evaluate food security in Banda, Ghana from 1000 to 2009 C.E. by combining ethnographic, archaeological, archaeobotanical, and environmental data. These multiple lines of evidence demonstrate that while changing environmental conditions may have impacted the availability of staple crops during two periods of droughts in the past, a decrease in access to preferred foods occurred only recently in the 1890s. [food security, paleoethnobotany, Africa]

Agricultural origins and dispersals are subjects of fundamental importance to archaeology as well... more Agricultural origins and dispersals are subjects of fundamental importance to archaeology as well as many other scholarly disciplines. These investigations are world-wide in scope and require significant amounts of paleobotanical data attesting to the exploitation of wild progenitors of crop plants and subsequent domestication and spread. Accordingly, for the past few decades the development of methods for identifying the remains of wild and domesticated plant species has been a focus of paleoethnobotany. Phytolith analysis has increasingly taken its place as an important independent contributor of data in all areas of the globe, and the volume of literature on the subject is now both very substantial and disseminated in a range of international journals. In this paper, experts who have carried out the hands-on work review the utility and importance of phytolith analysis in documenting the domestication and dispersals of crop plants around the world. It will serve as an important resource both to paleoethnobotanists and other scholars interested in the development and spread of agriculture.

The use of food as a core mode of exploring and explaining the world has expanded remarkably quic... more The use of food as a core mode of exploring and explaining the world has expanded remarkably quickly in the past ten years, with food studies programming in particular gaining ground in institutional learning arrangements. Establishing a new field and creating relevant educational programming carries its associated struggles, practicalities, and initial successes. To this end, this report highlights five of the most pressing themes to emerge from the 2013 "Future of Food Studies" interdisciplinary workshop, namely 1) locating food studies in the institutional culture; 2) training undergraduate and graduate students within and beyond disciplinarity; 3) establishing food studies labs and pedagogy; 4) engaging the public beyond the campus; and 5) funding strategies for research and training.

This article blends insights from gender, technology, and development studies with Ingold's conce... more This article blends insights from gender, technology, and development studies with Ingold's concept of taskscape to examine the interrelated nature of farming, food, and craft manufacture practices in Banda, Ghana during the last three centuries. We begin by comparing two ethnoarchaeological studies that were conducted separately by the authors, one that focused on food, and the other on ceramic production, preparation, and consumption. We use these data to analyze gendered taskscapes and how they have changed in recent decades with the introduction of new technologies and major economic and environmental shifts. Building on such insights, we analyze how taskscapes shifted in earlier centuries in Banda through archaeological remains of food and craft practice at the eighteenth-to twentieth-century site of Makala Kataa. Craft production cannot be fully understood without reference to food production, preparation, and consumption; thus, viewing these practices as interrelated tasks in a gendered taskscape yields insight into the rhythms of everyday life and highlights women's often undervalued skills.

Current Anthropology 55(4):444-468., 2014

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Antiquity, 2007

R��sum��/Abstract From examining the remains of charred cowpeas from rock shelters in Central Gha... more R��sum��/Abstract From examining the remains of charred cowpeas from rock shelters in Central Ghana, the authors throw light on the subsistence strategies of the Kintampo people of the second millennium BCE. Perhaps driven southwards from the Sahel by aridification, the Kintampo operated as both foragers and farmers, cultivating selected plants of the West African tropics, notably cowpea, pearl millet and oil palm.