Geology

Saturday, January 7, 2023: 11:50 AM
Regency Ballroom B (Loews Philadelphia Hotel)
Robyn d'Avignon, New York University
This talk introduces geological formations as a new regional framework for histories of Africa before 1900. I draw on the case of gold-bearing rocks of West Africa that have sustained gold mining for over a millennium. I ask how attention to ritual, intellectual, and/or technological connections made across geological formations can open up new questions about the transnational histories of well-digging, salt mining, and metallurgy.