## Introduction  
The experience of the African diaspora in the Americas has involved heritage, negotiation, appropriation, invention and redefinition. Research focused on material culture has broached the question of how Afro-American communities formed, mainly by considering the relations between the groups and the local societies. More recent attempts have sought to examine a transatlantic perspective, considering not only the particularities of the contexts in which the diasporic groups settled, but also the variety of ways in which African references may have been employed and redefined in this process shaping Afro-American identities. In this chapter, we will consider the issues and debates surrounding the dynamic of the material production of these populations in the Americas, focusing on three categories of evidence: the handmade ceramics found in slave houses (known as senzalas) and in other spaces occupied by Africans, iron metallurgy and the material structure of the settlements (known as quilombos). This evidence shall be approached based on archaeological and historiographical research. Although the debate will take into account the contexts of the United States of America and the Caribbean region, the main focus will be on Brazil, which was the main recipient of Africans under the transatlantic slave trade.