ABSTRACT
Linking particular locales in Africa with particular sites in the Americas is very much on the agenda for many scholars. One of the engines driving this development is new information on the precise workings of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Historians of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade have emphasized its specialized, patterned character. Many Africans arrived in a particular New World setting alongside Africans from the same coastal region. In the first quarter of the eighteenth century, just one region, the Bight of Biafra, supplied about 60 percent of Africans to the York Naval District in Virginia, which received more of the colony's Africans than colony's other four naval districts combined. African archaeologists often criticize their Americanist colleagues for their tendency to generalize about African cultures, for failing to reflect the complexity and variety of Africa. At the same time, perhaps, they should be applauding American archaeologists for beginning to strive to uncover certain African deep-level principles and fundamental ways of thinking.
