Environmental histories of the African diaspora challenge Eurocentric interpretations of the Columbian Exchange by identifying African antecedents in New World landscapes and cultures. This paper joins that effort by tracing the formation of African oil palm (Elaeis guineensis Jacq.) landscapes in Bahia, Brazil. Long essential in many West African societies, the African oil palm and its products diffused to Bahia early in the colonial period. Palm oil became an integral component of Afro-Brazilian culture and cuisine, and the palm groves that yield the oil represent an Afro-Brazilian landscape. Although the palm's West African origins are well known, and despite its importance in local cultures and global economies, studies of Bahia's African oil palm landscapes remain rare and generally ahistorical. This paper marshals evidence from colonial archives, traveller's accounts, ethnographies, fieldwork and digital geographic data to analyse the formation of Bahia's Dendê Coast (Costa do Dendê, or Palm Oil Coast). While Africans and Afro-Brazilians emerge as principal actors, the analysis places humans within a broader socioecological framework to demonstrate how historical processes, geographies, agroecologies and human agency all coalesced to establish and sustain Bahia's Afro-Brazilian landscape.

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O dendê é o óleo comestível mais produzido. Normalmente cultivada em monocultura nos trópicos desmatados, práticas de cultivo do dendezeiro ( Elaeis guineensis Jacq.) convidaram críticas dos pesquisadores e ambientalistas. Pesquisas recentes sugerem a agrofloresta do dendezeiro como uma alternativa sustentável à monocultura. Com uma série de entrevistas e observações de campo, este artigo examina as agroecologias do dendezeiro da Bahia nos contextos do Mundo Atlântico e o desenvolvimento agrícola modernista. A análise revela como bosques subespontâneos de dendezeiros da Bahia e seus sistemas de gestão etnoecológico representam uma contribuição Africana importante à transformação colonial das paisagens e também o primeiro passa de um modelo da agricultura sustentável.

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This chapter describes the European forest landscpe, including the vegetation and fauna of the last Ice Age, before the start of farming. The chapter states that farming spread across Europe from about 7000 years bp, and human populations and their domestic stock started to become the dominant driver of forest change. Further, the landscape was becoming cultural in character, and some now refer to the current era as the Anthropocene to reflect the degree of human influence. Woodland 'history' had begun.