Please pardon a self-interested announcement; university presses ask authors 
to do whatever they can to help get the word out on new publications --

New book

"Crossroads and Cosmologies: Diasporas and Ethnogenesis in the New World" 
by Christopher Fennell.

192 pages, Cloth ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-3141-5, 2007; with a foreword by 
Robert Farris Thompson; part of the Cultural Heritage Studies Series published 
by the University Press of Florida, http://www.upf.com.

"Crossroads" offers a fresh perspective on ways that the earliest enslaved 
Africans preserved vital aspects of their traditions and identities in the New 
World. This study also explores similar developments among European 
immigrants and the interactions of both groups with Native Americans. 
Focusing on extant artifacts left by displaced Africans, the author finds that 
material culture and religious ritual contributed to a variety of modes of 
survival in mainland North America as well as in the Caribbean and Brazil. Over 
time, new symbols of culture led to further changes in individual customs and 
beliefs as well as the creation of new social groups and new expressions of 
identity.

Publisher's description, table of contents, reviewer comments, and illustration 
are available online at:
http://www.diaspora.uiuc.edu/news0907/news0907.html#16