The Precolonial State in West Africa

J. Cameron Monroe is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Director of the Abomey Plateau Research Project in the Republic of Bénin, West Africa. He is the recipient of the Society for Historical Archaeology Dissertation Prize for 2005 and held a position as a postdoctoral fellow in African and African-American Studies, Anthropology, and History at Washington University in St Louis (2004–6). His research broadly addresses the political, economic, and cultural transformation in West Africa and the diaspora in the era of the slave trade. His research project (the Abomey Plateau Archaeological Project, Bénin) examines the political economy of landscape and the built environment, and the nature of urban transformation in West Africa in the Atlantic Era. He has published in Historical Archaeology, the Journal of African History, the Journal of Social Archaeology, Current Anthropology, Annual Review of Anthropology, and American Scientist Magazine. He is co-editor of Power and Landscape in Atlantic West Africa: Archaeological Perspectives. Monroe currently serves on the editorial board of Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa.