From the Shadows of an Atlantic Africa Citadel: Using GIS and Archaeology to Develop a Rural History of the Hueda (Whydah) Kingdom, c. 1650–1727

At its zenith from the late seventeenth to early eighteenth centuries, the Hueda (Whydah) kingdom was a meeting point for international trade items pouring into coastal West Africa and African captives disembarking into the terror of the Middle Passage.  In the historiography of the region, Huedan trade towns serve as the backdrop for such exchanges, points of final appeal in matters judicial, and locales for kingdom-wide religious ceremonies.  Yet, only the briefest documentary accounts and oral sources address outlying Huedan settlements.  In this paper, I use GIS analysis of architectural and artifact data collected outside of the two main Huedan settlements (i.e., Ouidah and Savi) to illustrate the process of ruralization that coincided with the kingdom’s fluorescence in the early to mid-seventeenth century.  I employ this analysis to demonstrate the integration of countryside communities into trans-Atlantic networks of exchange, the expansion of both urban and rural communities in the mid-seventeenth century, and the swath of destruction accompanying the conquest of Hueda by the kingdom of Dahomey in 1727.  I argue that these data can be used to present local political and economic processes that lay behind the rise and collapse of one of Atlantic Africa’s most infamous polities.