by EDWARD CARR
The discovery of a grave in Ghana helped elucidate a more complete picture of poverty and development over the decades in that African country. PHOTO/Edward Carr
(Scientific American editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from Edward R. Carr’s Delivering Development: Globalization’s Shoreline and the Road to a Sustainable Future.)
There is something very intimate about sitting in a grave with a skeleton, gently brushing soil off bones, beads, and other burial goods. The bones told us that this was a young man, probably around 19 or 20 years old at the time of his death. They did not provide any clues to the cause of his death. However, the grave goods associated with this young man told us a great deal about the connections between the people of this village and the larger world in the earliest days of the settlement. The materials in the grave all date to around 1825—the burial is the earliest evidence of occupation we have for this village. Buried with the man were beads from Venice and Bohemia (today the western part of the Czech Republic), a Dutch clay smoking pipe, and British sheet brass that had been hammered by an Akan craftsman into a vessel called a forowa, used to hold personal items. The markers of status and respect accorded this young man in his burial were global goods from various parts of Europe. This burial alone makes it clear just how integrated the people of this village were into the global economy, even in the earliest days of Dominase’s settlement. These goods were common enough, and had been around for long enough, to be incorporated into their lifeways such that they made sense as burial goods. This burial leaves little doubt that those who settled these villages were at least partially motivated by accessing this global trade, as well as integrating into the regional political economy.
Dominase and Ponkrum were not settled at random in the coastal hinterland of Elmina in Ghana. Instead the first residents set up alongside a road that the historian and archaeologist Gerard Chouin has identified as Asante Road #7. This road linked Elmina, the principal trading post in the area, to the powerful Asante kingdom inland. In the early 1800s slaves, gold, and various materials passed down this road from Asante to Elmina and the waiting ships of the Dutch, who controlled the trade around Elmina at that time. A tremendous variety of materials returned to Asante by this same route. By settling along this road, the founders of Dominase and Ponkrum positioned themselves to obtain trade goods in exchange for their crops along a reliable route to the markets at Elmina. These settlements are therefore creations of the interaction of a globalizing economy with this part of the world. In fact, places we often characterize as lacking, or needing, development are often better understood as the outcomes of development and globalization in the past.
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