About

Amanda Logan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern University and a 2022 Carnegie Fellow. She earned her PhD from the University of Michigan in 2012. Her research centers on building usable pasts through the archaeology of food security, with particular expertise in the archaeology of the last millennium in West Africa. Her analytical focus is paleoethnobotany, which involves studying archaeological plant remains to illuminate past foodways and develop narratives about food security that challenge present-day assumptions. Logan's work critically examines food security in Africa's deep past, notably through her book 'The Scarcity Slot: Excavating Histories of Food Security in Ghana,' which explores how African foodways have been viewed through a lens of scarcity and othering. Her research demonstrates that people in Banda, Ghana, thrived during a severe drought centuries ago, with food security declining only recently, thus challenging stereotypes about African foodways. Her scholarship integrates archaeological, historical, environmental data, and food ethnography to develop long-term histories of food security and sovereignty. Her recent fieldwork focuses on the medieval urban center of Ile-Ife, Nigeria, in collaboration with other scholars. Logan is actively involved in teaching courses related to food and culture, archaeology research design, and African archaeology, and she is currently accepting graduate students interested in African archaeology, archaeobotany, and food archaeology.

Research topics

• Medicine
• Internal medicine
• Family medicine
• Pathology
• Business
• Economics
• Microeconomics
• Biology
• Agroforestry
• Geography
• Archaeology

Selected publications

• Quantifying evidence for phenotypic specificity (PP4) for syndromic phenotypes: Large-scale integration of rare germline FH variants from diagnostic laboratory testing for HLRCC and renal cancer

  Genetics in Medicine · 2025-09-05

  articleOpen access

  PURPOSE: Hereditary leiomyomatosis and renal cell cancer (HLRCC) is a rare cancer susceptibility syndrome exclusively attributable to pathogenic variants in FH (HGNC:3700). This article quantitatively weights the phenotypic context (PP4/PS4) of such very rare variants in FH. METHODS: likelihood ratios (LLRs) as applicable within the updated American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics/Association for Molecular Pathology variant classification framework. RESULTS: For HLRCC, the PG-VRV-LR was estimated to be 2669.4 (95% CI 1843.4-3881.2, LLR 10.77) for truncating variants and 214.7 (95% CI 185.0-246.9, LLR 7.33) for missense variants. For renal cancer, the PG-VRV-LR was 95.5 (95% CI 48.9-183.0, LLR 6.23) for truncating variants and 5.8 (95% CI 3.5-9.3, LLR 2.39) for missense variants. Clustering analysis in HLRCC cases revealed 3 "hotspot" regions wherein the DS-VRMV-LR increased to 1226.9. CONCLUSION: These data provide quantitative measures for very rare missense and truncating variants in FH, which reflect the differing phenotypic specificity of HLRCC and renal cancer and may be applicable in clinical variant classification.

  PublisherDOI

• Early archaeological evidence of wheat and cotton from medieval Ile-Ife, Nigeria

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2024 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Archaeology
  • Geography
  • Agroforestry

  sp.) recovered from late 12th- to early 13th-century CE contexts suggest earlier and more widespread use than wheat. Cotton may have been cultivated and manufactured into cloth locally. The quick adoption of these exotic crops illustrates the active negotiation of prestige through culinary and adornment practices, as well as a high degree of agricultural experimentation.

  PublisherDOI

• Strontium isoscape of sub-Saharan Africa allows tracing origins of victims of the transatlantic slave trade

  Nature Communications · 2024-12-30 · 19 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Strontium isotope ( 87 Sr/ 86 Sr) analysis with reference to strontium isotope landscapes (Sr isoscapes) allows reconstructing mobility and migration in archaeology, ecology, and forensics. However, despite the vast potential of research involving 87 Sr/ 86 Sr analysis particularly in Africa, Sr isoscapes remain unavailable for the largest parts of the continent. Here, we measure the 87 Sr/ 86 Sr ratios in 778 environmental samples from 24 African countries and combine this data with published data to model a bioavailable Sr isoscape for sub-Saharan Africa using random forest regression. We demonstrate the efficacy of this Sr isoscape, in combination with other lines of evidence, to trace the African roots of individuals from historic slavery contexts, particularly those with highly radiogenic 87 Sr/ 86 Sr ratios uncommon in the African Diaspora. Our study provides an extensive African 87 Sr/ 86 Sr dataset which includes scientifically marginalized regions of Africa, with significant implications for the archaeology of the transatlantic slave trade, wildlife ecology, conservation, and forensics.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Ife-Sungbo Archaeological Project, 2018-2022. Final Report.

  2023-01-10

  preprintOpen access
  Publisher

• We Need Social Archaeology to Understand Resilience and Build Usable Pasts

  African Archaeological Review · 2023-11-18 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• How African Pasts Can Inspire Alternative Responses to Climate Change: a Creative Writing Experiment

  African Archaeological Review · 2023-08-25 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract How can we use the past to help us solve today’s urgent climate change concerns? Archaeology provides one way forward by providing a long-term view of what worked and what did not work in the past. Indigenous knowledge systems have long curated a range of survival strategies that provide powerful inspiration for thinking differently about sustainability. Inspired by Africanfuturism—or how writers of African descent have creatively reimagined Black futures—we explore how creative writing can mobilize the past to rethink climate change responses. We have designed this piece for use in middle and secondary school science, history, or literature classes. An introductory explanation and “what we know” sections provide teachers with the necessary framing and background knowledge. The two short stories could be assigned to 13–18-year-old students to illustrate the kind of reimagining they might pursue based on archaeological and oral historical information.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Mission Archéologique Ife-Sungbo 2018-2022 - Rapport quadriennal

  HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2022-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  Publisher

• The Scarcity Slot

  2020-11-24 · 5 citations

  bookOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. The Scarcity Slot is the first book to critically examine food security in Africa’s deep past. Amanda L. Logan argues that African foodways have been viewed through the lens of ‘the scarcity slot,’ a kind of Othering based on presumed differences in resources. Weaving together archaeological, historical, and environmental data with food ethnography, she advances a new approach to building long-term histories of food security on the continent in order to combat these stereotypes. Focusing on a case study in Banda, Ghana that spans the past six centuries, The Scarcity Slot reveals that people thrived during a severe, centuries-long drought just as Europeans arrived on the coast, with a major decline in food security emerging only recently. This narrative radically challenges how we think about African foodways in the past with major implications for the future.

  PublisherDOI

• 4. Creating Chronic Food Insecurity in the Gold Coast Colony

  2020-11-24

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Creating Chronic Food Insecurity in the Gold Coast ColonyIn the nineteenth century, considerable turbulence was unleashed along the vast trade networks that had for so many centuries defined social and economic interactions from the West African coast to the Sahara.This turbulence resulted from a complex array of sources.The Atlantic slave trade was formally brought to a close, cutting off many polities from a prime source of income.At the same time, economic recession, political maneuvering, and ideological shifts across the globe led European governments to scramble for African land and resources after the trade in African people was outlawed.The friction among these desires contributed to local hostilities, resulting in violence and dislocation over wide swathes of regions encompassed by the modern nation-state of Ghana and beyond.By the end of the nineteenth century, the imposition of colonial boundaries had quelled much of this upheaval, but for many areas did little to make up for the losses already suffered.Colonial governments ushered in a new era, one in which the value of commodities was defined in European capitals, which in turn etched "development" unevenly across African landscapes and social groups.The impacts of these economic and political shifts in the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries varied across the landscape.In some areas, these changes provided the necessary preconditions for the entrenchment of chronic food insecurity.Demographic collapse and the imposition of marketbased economic policies fixed the seasonal food shortage known as the hungry season gap into a permanent feature of some African livelihoods.Yet these forces remained largely invisible to British officials, who tended to suffer from historical amnesia and often viewed Africans as lazy and backwards.In this chapter, I follow in the footsteps of numerous scholars who have demonstrated the invalidity of these timeless stereotypes.Instead, I investigate how Africans coped with the loss of human capital-both people and the knowledges and labor they provided-and remade their lives in the uncertain conditions that prevailed in

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 5. Consuming a Remotely Global Modernity in Recent Times

  2020-11-24

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Gérard Chouin

  8 shared

• Pan Zheng

  6 shared

• Léa Roth

  Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

  6 shared

• Yang Liu

  McMaster University

  6 shared

• Ann B. Stahl

  5 shared

• Michelle Hegmon

  4 shared

• Olivia Giddings

  University Hospitals of Cleveland

  4 shared

• Emuobosa Akpo Orijemie

  University of Ibadan

  4 shared

Labs

• Archaeology Teaching LaboratoryPI

Awards & honors

• 2022 Carnegie Fellow
• 2017 Gordon R. Willey Prize from the Archaeology Division of…
• 2013 Society of American Archaeology Dissertation Award
• First Book Award from the Association for the Study of Food…