Fields-Black (history, Carnegie-Mellon Univ.) digs out key periods in the technological history of West Africa's coastal littoral by focusing on historical linguistics and tracing environmentally specific knowledge and its use in tidewater rice farming. Despite the potentially esoteric focus on the precolonial (first millennium) history of a sub-region of West Africa and the use of specialist methodologies, Fields-Black manages to make her research and its implications accessible to a wider audience. The volume's final chapter on the African diaspora is a bridge between precolonial coastal Africa and the technology of the American South in the slave trade era explored by Judith Carney in Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (CH, Oct'01, 39-0928). Readers will appreciate the book's clarity of expression and revealing discussions of historical analysis and argumentation. The author's interdisciplinary and comparative approaches challenge archaeological theories of diffusion from the inland Niger Delta to the 'rice coast' and sharpen the understanding of technology transfer and dynamic cultural change in the Atlantic era. Summing Up: Recommended. Research and classroom use at undergraduate and graduate levels.

-- ChoiceC. L. Goucher, Washington State University, December 2009--C. L. Goucher, Washington State University (01/01/2009).