The Tide Goes Out

We have clear evidence from the 1940s on that the residents of Dominase and Ponkrum had some understanding of the larger networks in which they were caught up, and they understood how to manipulate those in charge of those networks to get things they wanted. Farmers in these villages were growing cocoa and oil palm as well as various food crops. They buttressed their agricultural incomes with wage and commercial activities facilitated by the road through their villages and the logging operation to the north. Archaeological evidence suggests that by the 1960s livelihoods in these villages were stable and robust.1 For example, my field crew and I found relatively large numbers of glass shards from bottled beverages littering the yards of houses in Dominase. These bottled drinks were expensive and had to be purchased in town, usually with cash. In 2010 it is rare to get such bottled beverages in the village. The bottles are actually more highly prized than the drinks inside, as the bottles can be reused to hold everything from kerosene (for oil lamps) to akpeteshi. As a result, glass bottles are guarded jealously and rarely broken, never discarded. This makes the large amount of glass found in the 1960s-era yards of Dominase surprising. The number of glass fragments suggests a much larger number of these bottles and, likely, the drinks they contained, in these villages in the 1960s than I saw during my fieldwork between 1997 and 2006. This suggests, in turn, that the households living in Dominase in the 1960s were able to make these purchases because they enjoyed greater incomes than do their twenty-first century counterparts.