This review examines how multiscalar forces shaped urban trajectories in West Africa, specifically. Despite the antiquity of urban traditions across Africa,however, long-distance forces clearly had wide-reaching impacts on urban developmental trajectories, and proponents of the functional model have yet to explain the specific role of long-distance forces in the process of urbanization. As a result, deeply rooted urban traditions have been identified in all corners of the continent. In the past few decades, the pace o f archaeological work on African cities has accelerated, and archaeologists have increasingly deployed a functional mode l of the city, in which cities are defined in relation to broader hinterlands rather than particular traits. Sub-Saharan Africa has long been seen as lacking the potential for autochthonous urban development, and Near Eastern and European contact provided ready explanations for the emergence of precolonial cities across the continent. I explore how such manipulations contribute to variation in intra- and inter-site dynamics during the period of occupation, and consequently the variation in these dynamics affects the development and transmission of an institutionalized memory of the slave trade among local residents, contributing to an increasing discourse of the African Diaspora. I argue that the transnational trading elites (and their families) manipulated their perceived identities towards a polarized "native" or "other" as a defensive mechanism and adaptive means to experience continued success in transatlantic slaving endeavors under the gaze of anti-slavery patrols. Looking at the ways in which material and architectural remains, contextualized through a historical lens, can indicate the intentional signaling of cultural and ethnic identities. Specifically, results from excavations conducted in 2016-2017 at the village of Gambia and oral traditions collected there are compared to archaeological information gathered in 2013 at the villages of Bangalan, Farenya, and Sanya Paulia in a consideration of wider-scale intercultural interactions. Archaeological excavations, documentary records, and oral traditions are examined to determine how historical factors affect daily life and political organization at these slave trading sites. This dissertation employs an interdisciplinary framework to investigate the variation among slave trading villages of the nineteenth century Rio Pongo. In these situations, foreign traders were able to integrate themselves into local networks, gaining access to social and material capital, and creating a new class of transnational trading families that would direct the evolution of local social and political landscapes. As Britain pressured European and American imperial powers to join in anti-slave trading endeavors in the early portion of the nineteenth century, the slave trade was directed to areas such as the Rio Pongo in coastal Guinea, where imperial and national powers were scarce, and both legal and contraband trade could continue to succeed. The nineteenth century transatlantic slave trade had significant social, political, and economic ramifications for coastal West African environments.