Colloquium Series - Pastcasting Food Futures through Archaeology: An Example from West Africa

Abstract: In recent years, archaeologists have argued for the relevance of our disciplinary perspective for addressing modern day problems, echoing applied archaeologists of a generation ago. In this talk, I explore the potential and limits of ‘pastcasting’ – the idea that we can plan for possible futures based on scenarios and paths taken (and not taken) in the past. To do so, I build off of my long-term research on food security in West Africa, which attests to the importance of indigenous African grains for weathering severe, prolonged drought and speaks directly to recent attempts to promote these grains as climate resilient alternatives to commodity crops. At the same time, my work also complicates the notion that Africa’s ancient grains can solve future food security problems. I show how chronic hunger emerged as a structural problem in the last two centuries, underscoring the importance of understanding historical and social contexts in recent times. Building on this work, I explore how we can use pastcasting to grapple with the complexity of the past and present and our disciplinary silos. I illustrate how a direct historical approach that centers community engagement helps us avoid the pitfalls of our applied archaeology ancestors. I argue that to create truly usable pasts, we must also do the critical bridging work between social, historical, and environmental archaeologies. 

Speaker Bio: Amanda Logan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University, USA. She received her PhD from University of Michigan in 2012. Logan uses archaeobotanical data to address food security, gender, trade, and structural violence in West Africa over the last millennium. Her current fieldwork projects are based in Nigeria and southern Benin. She has published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, American Anthropologist, and Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, among others. Her first book, The Scarcity Slot: Excavating Histories of Food Security in Ghana, was published by the University of California Press in 2020 and won the First Book Award from the Association for the Study of Food and Society. In 2022, she was named a Carnegie Fellow to support a multi-sited archaeological exploration of food security across West Africa. 

Zoom Link:  https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/83450857706