• List of Tables Orthography Introduction
• 1. The Rio Nunez Region: A Small Corner of West Africa's Rice Coast Region
• 2. The First-Comers and the Roots of Coastal Rice-growing Technology
• 3. The Newcomers and the Seeds of Tidal Rice-Growing Technology
• 4. Coastal Collaboration and Specialization: Flowering of Tidal Rice-Growing Technologies
• 5. The Strangers and the Branches of Coastal Rice-growing Technology, c.1500 to 1800
• 6. Feeding the Slave Trade: The Trade in Rice and Captives from West Africa's Rice Coast Conclusion
• Appendix I.1 Fieldwork Interviews
• Appendix I.2 Rice Terminology in Atlantic Languages Spoken in the Coastal Rio Nunez Region Notes Bibliography Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Mangrove rice farming on West Africa's Rice Coast was the mirror image of tidewater rice plantations worked by enslaved Africans in 18th-century South Carolina and Georgia. This book reconstructs the development of rice-growing technology among the Baga and Nalu of coastal Guinea, beginning more than a millennium before the transatlantic slave trade. It reveals a picture of dynamic pre-colonial coastal societies, quite unlike the static, homogenous pre-modern Africa of previous scholarship. From its examination of inheritance, innovation, and borrowing, Deep Roots fashions a theory of cultural change that encompasses the diversity of communities, cultures, and forms of expression in Africa and the African diaspora.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)