J. Cameron Monroe is an historical archaeologist in the Department of Anthropology@the University of California, Santa Cruz. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2003 and was a postdoctoral fellow in African and African-American Studies, Anthropology and History@Washington University in St. Louis. He received the Society for Historical Archaeology’s dissertation prize in 2005. Monroe’s research examines political, economic and cultural transformations in West Africa and the African diaspora in the era of the slave trade. He has studied African-American ethnic identity and household-level craft production in early colonial Virginia. He directs the Abomey Plateau Archaeological Project in the Republic of Bénin, West Africa. Integrating documentary, oral and archaeological data, the project focuses on the political economy of landscape and the built environment, and the nature of urban transformation in contact-period West Africa. He serves on the editorial advisory board for Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa. Address: Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1156 High St., Santa Cruz, CA 95060. E-mail: jcmonroe@ucsc.edu