Cartographic sources tell us 18th century Goree was a rural colonial outpost with few military structures and three distinct villages of African settlement: Gourmettes (free merchants), Habitants (free persons associated with Company headquarters), and captives. The last group appears to have been centrally housed in what maps refer to as the Village des Bambaras. While the Village's founding occupants probably included Bambara from Mali, the name came to mean any captive African. Early 18th century maps suggest the Village was one of the earliest centralized spaces on the island reserved for Goree's ethnically mixed captive population. By mid to late 18th century, the Village des Bambaras disappears from cartographic sources. Across the lowland, village areas were replaced with a dense cityscape of European-styled stone housing. This dissertation examines the transition from rural to urban and from African contexts into Eurafrican and European ones through the lenses of archaeology and archival research.;Two sites were excavated within the area still known as Goree's Bambara Quarter, centrally-located site GI-4 in the vicinity of the mapped locale for the Village des Bambaras and site GI-22 on its western periphery. Intense building episodes that transformed rural Goree and the Quarter into an urban trade center is charted by comparing stratigraphy and material culture at these two sites. The research question is divided into three parts: (1) Settlement trajectory that examines the spatial, architectural, and material nature of settlement for enslaved Africans on Goree; (2) Urban integration and its affects on captive settlement, architecture, and material culture; (3) Economic interaction and its role in the diversification of material culture.;Changes in floor construction, diminished dependence on local wares, and a more diversified artifact assemblage in horizons associated with stone architecture are the stratigraphic and material markers of Goree's urban transformation. Archival research frames discussion on the shift in labor relations between Habitants, the Company, and captives and changing consumer demands as the island moved from a military post dependant on male-based slave labor to erect the colony's infrastructure---roads and forts, to a residential zone headed by women centered on female-based slave labor for household domestic tasks.
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