Savi (also spelled Xavier, Sabi or Sabbee) was the capital city of the Hueda kingdom, located on the Atlantic coast of Africa near the town of Ouidah in what is today Benin. Between 1670 and 1727, Savi was the leading West African port for the European slave trade.
Savi's Beginnings
During the 14th and 15th centuries AD, Hueda was one of several small kingdoms along the forested coasts of what is now Togo, Benin, and Nigeria. The kings controlled an area of several hundred square kilometers, and relied on regional governors to collect tribute and organize religious ceremonies and corvee labor. Gold, brass, clay, ivory and cloth were produced and traded to larger polities throughout the region.
The arrival of European traders in the late 15th century created a reorganization of that network, and Savi became an important capital for the West African kingdoms.
Architecture of Savi
Archaeological evidence shows that old Savi included an elite area with a palace complex and a few European trading lodges within an area of approximately 6.5 hectares. This area was surrounded by an extensive set of earthworks and ditches. The ditches were up to eight meters deep, with segments 10-70 meters wide and up to 220 meters long.
The Hueda manipulated the Europeans, so that the trading lodges were of inferior construction and size compared to the palace; European brick brought in for the specific purposes of constructing the trading houses was taken for the palace.
Ditches and Symbolic Space
Archaeological and ethnohistorical research has led scholars to believe that the ditch which encircled the palace complex and trading lodges was symbolically important. This architectural feature of many Western African groups employed monumental architecture to identify differences in social hierarchies. Such symbolically defensive ditches have been linked to West African images of snakes on both sides of the Atlantic.
Savi was destroyed by Dahomey in 1727, although there still is a modern town. Savi was excavated in the 1990s by a team led by Kenneth G. Kelly. also spelled
Sources
Kelly, Kenneth G. 1997 Using Historically Informed Archaeology: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Hueda/European Interaction on the Coast of Benin. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 4(3-4):353-366.
Norman, Neil L. and Kenneth G. Kelly 2004 Landscape Politics: The Serpent Ditch and the Rainbow in West Africa. American Anthropologist 106(1):98–110.
This glossary entry is part of the Dictionary of Archaeology.
