(African) Atlantic Creoles and late 18th and 19th Century Coastal Guinea

“Atlantic Creoles” is a term that has recently come into common usage, ussually to describe the charter generations of Africans in sustained contact with Europeans in the developing African Atlantic. The Rivers region of the Upper Guinea coast of the present-day Guinea is an ideal setting in which to explore a latter manifestation of the “Atlantic Creoles” arising from the complex and messy interactions that developed in the late 18th and first half of the 19th century, as the so-called “illegal” slave trade in this region. This paper uses the notion of “Atlantic Creoles” as a departure for exploring the potential archaeological and historical research on the Rio Pongo at a series of sites associated with the European, American, and African traders in slave and other commodities.