Dr. Amanda Logan

Biography

Amanda Logan’s research focuses on building usable pasts in archaeology and food security. Her expertise lies in studying the millennium in West Africa, which encompasses the rise and fall of the trans-Saharan trade, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and colonialism. She has an analytical focus on paleoethnobotany, which studies how people interacted with plants in the past. Her archaeological work provides critical empirical data that illuminate past foodways and aims to build new narratives around food security to challenge present-day assumptions. Her book, "Scarcity Slot: Excavating Histories of African Food Security" published in 2020, critically examines food security within Africa’s deep past and argues that African foodways are often viewed through the lens of ‘the scarcity slot,’ which perpetuates Othering based on presumed resource differences. Through her work, she seeks to combat stereotypes and present African foodways as thriving under adverse conditions. Recognized for her contributions, she is a 2022 Carnegie Fellow and has received numerous accolades for her research in archaeology. Currently, her fieldwork focuses on the medieval urban center of Ile-Ife, Nigeria, conducting research in collaboration with other scholars.

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