Abstract: Many studies of the slave trade in West Africa have focused on the role of the state and the corresponding regional relationships that developed between states (at the center) and the decentralized societies at their peripheries, which were often targeted in slave raids. Such a focus obscures the dynamic interactions taking place within the so-called periphery between diverse groups of inhabitants, including farmers, traders, slavers, and so on. This paper reports on historical archaeological research into the history of one such periphery, nineteenth-century north-western Ghana using site biographies to highlight the diversity of responses from local communities to a situation of increasing insecurity.