"It’s not about us": Exploring Race, Community, and Commemoration at the "Angela Site" on Jamestown Island, Virginia.

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Community Archaeology in 2020: Conventional or Revolutionary?" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

This paper explores the complex relationship between making African Diaspora history and culture visible at Historic Jamestowne, a setting that has historically been seen as “white”. The four hundredth anniversary of the forced arrival of Africans in Virginia has created a fraught space to examine African American collective memories of shared history, community, and commemoration. Archaeologists and heritage professionals at Jamestown are engaging the local descendant African American community in collective knowledge production centered around Angela, one of the first African women that lived at Jamestown in the 1620s. Here, the Angela Site is foregrounding the life and influences of one of the first “invisible” African women to have lived and labored in the colony. Connecting postcolonial theory and community-collaborative methods, this paper explores the production of dominant histories, plausible alternative interpretations of the colonial past, and relationships between heritage sites and local descendant communities.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020   •
• Community Archaeology in 2020: Conventional or Revolutionary?

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 149