Where Tradition and Pragmatism Meet: African Diaspora Archaeology at the Crossroads

The trope of “tradition” dominates archaeological studies of the African diaspora. Much of the information archaeologists have about traditions on the African continent or in the early diaspora comes from historical documents and from ethnography. Here, the author argues that pragmatism provides a model for analysis that allows archaeology a degree of independence from these allied datasets. Archaeologists, like other social scientists, confront the problem of the relative importance of social learning (i.e., tradition) vs. structure as forces shaping cultural expression in the African diaspora. An analytical strategy inspired by pragmatism is here applied to beads recovered from Tidewater Chesapeake slave quarters occupied in the 18th and early 19th centuries in order to demonstrate that tradition is only part of the story