Material culture has therefore become essential for advancing research on the techniques and knowledge Africans carried with them, their religious practices, their aesthetic tastes and their ways of resisting oppression, achieving integration and doing business. For example, in 2011, some extraordinary discoveries were made during an archaeological excavation carried out at Cais do Valongo (former harbour of Rio de Janeiro, where more than half a million Africans disembarked between the end of the eighteenth century and 1831), recognized as a World Heritage site by UNESCO in 2017. Several tons of the material remains of enslaved people and those employed in the slave trade have been unearthed there. One example concerns research into glass beads, through which Patrícia Brito (2019) discovered important details about the bead trade in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro and the participation of enslaved communities in this trade. In addition, she found out that preferences for a certain type of bead (known as the 'drawn bead'), for certain colours (such as blue) and for larger bead sizes were associated with symbolism and with social and religious stratification. In their chapter for this book, Flávio dos Santos Gomes and Luís Cláudio Pereira Symanski look at the importance of historical archaeology in the study of African traditions recreated in the quilombos and districts where enslaved people lived in the Americas.  
Lastly, catechisms, dictionaries, songs, interviews, collections of tales from oral traditions and newspaper announcements were used to think about language and other forms of communication in African diasporas. Even though the languages spoken by Africans did not become predominant in the societies examined, documents show that, at certain times, they were widely used and did not disappear completely. The contributions to this book show that African languages changed the host languages in the diasporas and created new cultures.