Power and Landscape in Southern Bénin: Commercial Entanglement and the Question of Scale in the Archaeology of Atlantic West Africa

West Africa in the era of Atlantic commercial exchange has become the focus of major archaeological research. This paper considers how archaeologists are accounting for the nature of West African responses to entanglement within broader Atlantic commercial spheres. First, the nature of the discussion is introduced, highlighting tensions between historical and archaeological narratives of social and economic change in this period. I suggest that these tensions are largely the product of analyses conducted at different scales rather than clear disagreement between sources. Anthropological perspectives on landscape and power are then marshaled as a method for considering the broader impacts of Atlantic commercial entanglement, integrating historical and archaeological data within the same scale of analysis, and illuminating broader patterns of social, cultural, and political change in this period. Focusing on recent archaeological work in Southern Bénin, I introduce the dynamic nature of the state-generated landscape of the Kingdom of Dahomey, the understanding of which provides a more nuanced context in which to explore transformations in material life at multiple scales of analysis (household, community, and region).