A maroon legacy? Sketching African contributions to live fencing practices in early Spanish America Chris S. Duvall Department of Geography, University of New Mexico, New Mexico, USA Correspondence: Chris S. Duvall (email: duvall@unm.edu) Geographers have generally neglected African influences in attempting to understand the historical development of cultural landscapes in the tropical and subtropical Americas. In this paper, I analyze the early post-Columbian history of live fencing in the Americas, focusing on Spanish-held areas in the 1500s and 1600s. Live fences characterize many modern landscapes in the tropical and subtropical Americas, but the historical geography of these landscape features is poorly known. I show that live fences bear Native American, European and African inheritances, but argue that the African contribution was particularly significant. Specifically, escaped slaves – or maroons – like many contemporaneous communities in Africa, experienced conditions of endemic warfare and labour shortage. Live fences were an effective and labour-efficient means of defence, and all descriptions of live fences in the tropical and subtropical Americas before about 1800 were observed in maroon settlements. As African communities integrated into the multicultural societies of tropical and subtropical America other benefits of live fencing came to be more widely valued and integral to land management throughout the region – though its African inheritance has been forgotten. To understand more completely the historical cultural ecology of the Americas, geogra- phers must challenge the deeply rooted belief that Africans contributed only labour in the devel- opment of New World landscapes. Keywords: historical geography, cultural ecology, slavery, Central America, warfare, Atlantic Basin Introduction Scholars in African studies have for decades approached the Atlantic Basin as an intellectual and historical-geographical unit, but with few exceptions geographers have not taken this view (Carney & Voeks, 2003). Limiting geographical analyses to single subcontinental areas may create artificially constrained spaces that have never existed in the lived experience or historical memory of particular peoples or places (Lewis & Wigen, 1999; Voeks, 1997). In the Atlantic Basin, the traditional area studies approach is problematic because the vigorous trade, social and cultural networks that developed soon after 1492 linked four continents (Meinig, 1986; Mintz, 1985; Voeks, 1997; Warner-Lewis, 2003). Recently, the geographers Judith Carney (2001) and Robert Voeks (1997) have advanced knowledge of tropical Atlantic history by assessing African legacies in New World cultural ecologies (Hawthorne, forthcoming). This field of research represents a frontier in human–environment and historical geography because most analyses of post-Columbian landscape change hardly mention Africans, presenting them – if at all – only as passive, enslaved adjuncts to European-led endeavours that transformed Native American environments (Carney, 2001, 2006; Carney & Voeks, 2003). Certainly, the elementary power dynamics of slavery meant that the majority of those transported from Africa were prevented from leading processes of innovation and doi:10.1111/j.1467-9493.2009.00366.x Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 30 (2009) 232–247 © 2009 The Author Journal compilation © 2009 Department of Geography, National University of Singapore and Blackwell Publishing Asia Pty Ltd