Material Biographies: Saharan Trade and the Lives of Objects in Fourteenth and Fifteenth-Century West Africa

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AbstractThis article explores the lives of several copper alloy vessels (bowls, basins, and ewers), made in Egypt and England, that were carried across the Sahara just before the dawn of the European age of exploration, and that eventually found their way to central Ghana. It considers how and why prestige metal goods, some of them produced for specific individuals, became trade commodities that traveled thousands of kilometers, ending up in Akan communities where they were given new meanings. In thinking about material things and the mutability of meaning, the article attempts to address how we might understand these trade items as discursive “objects of knowledge” connecting peoples living in different times and different places.