Their widely studied wills and post-mortem inventories have shed light on various aspects of Africans' lives, such as their occupations, how they managed to purchase certain goods and their freedom. Because of the wealth of information they have to offer, these documents have also been explored as sources for biographies of Africans and their descendants. The numerous biographies published in the last two decades clearly suggest a departure from strictly demographic, economic and social historical perspectives and a move towards perspectives centred on more concrete, individual experiences. The latter type of perspective often illuminates issues related to the demographic, economic and societal characteristics of the many living environments of diasporic Africans (Lindsay and Sweet, 2013).  
Another dimension of the sources used for studying diasporas in Global Africa is a focus on a broad definition of material culture which goes beyond artefacts by recognizing that human relationships are both social and material. From this perspective, the material world is no longer seen as a mere backdrop to the development of social action, but is instead recognized as the 'means for building memory, giving coherence and continuity to social life and, thus, cultural reproduction' (Silva Santos, Symanski and Holl, 2019, p. 27). In recent  
decades, material-culture studies have emerged as a transdisciplinary field, dealing with both the past and contemporary issues and involving disciplines such as archaeology and anthropology, as well as history, cultural geography, sociology, museology, the hard sciences and technology studies. In recent decades, on both sides of the Atlantic and in East Africa and the Indian Ocean regions, there has been an increase in archaeological research aimed at understanding the history of the African diasporas (Silva Santos, Symanski and Holl, 2019; Allen, 2017; Seetah, 2015; Ogundiran and Saunders, 2014; Haviser and MacDonald, 2007; Ogundiran and Falola, 2007; others).