“Folkeliv” and Black Folks’ Lives: Archaeology, History, and Contemporary Black Atlantic Communities

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "“Folkeliv” and Black Folks’ Lives: Archaeology, History, and Contemporary Black Atlantic Communities," at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Archaeological research of the post-Columbian era has been underway in the Caribbean since the earliest years of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This work has been influential to the study of the African Diaspora, but it has not always been inclusive. This symposium is an introduction to contemporary projects dedicated to reclaiming aspects of Black pasts in the Caribbean. Talks here will discuss archaeological field schools conducted in villages once occupied by enslaved Africans, community-engaged excavations with local Afro-Caribbean residents, digitized archival research conducted in former colonial capitals, and landscape surveys of surveillance. The focus of this symposium is the United States Virgin Islands (former Danish West Indies), but the goal is to reclaim aspects of Black folklife (folkeliv in Danish) through the archaeological investigation of documents, objects, and spaces created by African ancestors while interrogating the multifaceted, intersectional role of African diaspora research in the 21st century.