The Slave Wrecks Project in National Park Units of St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands

Summary

Since 2010 the National Park Service (NPS) has worked with the Smithsonian Institution and George Washington University to foster greater understanding of how the African slave trade shaped global history. This endeavor—the Slave Wrecks Project (SWP)—represents a long-term, multi-national effort to locate, document, protect, and analyze maritime sites pertaining to the slave trade, following the entire process including capture, transportation, sale, enslavement, resistance, and freedom.

The effort began in Africa, and in 2015 the SWP continued its goals in the Caribbean, working at NPS properties on St. Croix, USVI. There, systematic remote sensing surveys surrounding Buck Island Reef National Monument have yielded multiple shipwrecks, two of which may be the remains of vessels engaged in the slave trade. The effort to locate and document these wrecks serves as the mechanism to build local capacity for research, education, and interpretation of this global story.

Cite this Record

The Slave Wrecks Project in National Park Units of St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. David Morgan, Jessica Keller, Jeneva Wright, Meredith Hardy, Dave Conlin, Stephen Lubkemann, Paul Gardullo, Chris DeCorse. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, Washington, D.C. 2016 ( tDAR id: 435001)

Keywords

Temporal Keywords
Colonial

Spatial Coverage

min long: -129.199; min lat: 24.495 ; max long: -66.973; max lat: 49.359 ;

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 688