Department/College/UnitSocial Sciences Division

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Biography, Education and Training

Professor J. Cameron Monroe earned a B.A. from UC Berkeley (1995), M.A. from UCLA (1999), and PhD from UCLA (2003), all degrees in Anthropology. Between 2004 and 2006, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Departments of African and African American Studies, Anthropology, and History at Washington University in St. Louis. He joined the Department of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz in the Fall of 2006. He has participated in archaeological field research in Armenia, Belize, Bénin, Haiti, Israel, Sudan and the United States (California and Virginia).

Summary of Expertise

Archaeology of West Africa and the African Diaspora; historical anthropology; social complexity and the state; urbanism; space, landscape and monumentality; culture contact and change; spatial analysis and GIS; West Africa (Bénin) and the Caribbean (Haiti).

Research Interests

Professor J. Cameron Monroe’s research broadly examines political, economic, and cultural transformation in West Africa and the Diaspora in the era of the slave trade. He has conducted longterm research in the Republic of Bénin in West Africa (The Abomey Plateau Archaeological Project). This project explores the the political economy of landscape and the built environment and the nature of urban transformation in West Africa during the era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In 2015 he initiated a comparative project on the materiality of power and political sovereignty in post-revolutionary Haiti. This project (The Milot Archaeological Project) examines the royal palace site of Sans-Souci in its broader political and economic context in the Kingdom of Hayti, a short-lived experiment in political order in the wake of the Haitian revolution.

Selected Publications

Books:

• The Precolonial State in West Africa: Building Power in Dahomey. New York: Cambridge University Press, (2014).
• Power and Landscape in Atlantic West Africa: Archaeological Perspectives, Co-edited with Akin Ogundiran, New York: Cambridge University Press (2012).

Articles:

• ‘‘Elephants for Want of Towns’’: Archaeological Perspectives on West African Cities and Their Hinterlands". Journal of Archaeological Research 26:4 (2018).
• "New Light From Haiti's Royal Past: Recent Archaeological Excavations in The Palace of Sans-Souci, Milot". The Journal of Haitian Studies 23:2 (2017).
• “Power and Agency in Precolonial African States”, Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2012).
• “In the Belly of Dan: Space, History, and Power in Precolonial Dahomey”, Current Anthropology 52:6, pp. 769-798 (2012).
• “Urbanism on West Africa’s Slave Coast: Archaeology sheds new light on cities in the era of the Atlantic slave trade”, American Scientist 99(5):400-409 (2011).
• “Power by design: architecture and politics in precolonial Dahomey”, Journal of Social Archaeology 10(3): 477-507 (2010).
• “Continuity, Revolution, or Evolution on the Slave Coast of West Africa? Royal Architecture and Political Order in Pre-colonial Dahomey”, Journal of African History 48, 349-373 (2007).