Material Culture and Indigenous Spiritism: The Katamansu Archaeological "Otutu" (Shrine)

Through the integration of oral history and ethnographic and historical data with archaeological evidence, attempts have been made to understand and reconstruct the settlement history of Katamansu, a late eighteenth-century historic town located on the Accra Plains of Ghana. Two seasons of archaeological excavations at the Koowule site of the town yielded some evidence of the 1826 Battle of Katamansu, a battle that was fought on the site between the Asante and the Ga and their coastal allies of the Gold Coast. The excavations also yielded two spectacular features, whose configuration and content appear to be the remains of a shrine of the Ga people. The features correlate well with ethnographic parallels described by Margaret Field, an anthropologist, in her research on the religion and medicine of the Ga in the 1930s. This paper presents the historical and material evidence of the 1826 battle as well as the analysis of the shrine contents. The shrine features provide insights into an archaeological shrine's mundane materiality. They also expose how local (Neolithic and historic) and European artifacts were recrafted and imbued with medicinal, magical, and spiritual properties to possibly cure and impress patients and supplicants in shrine ritual practices.