From Island to the City: A Preliminary Archaeological Investigation of Krio and Aku Settlements at Tasso Island and Freetown, Sierra Leone.

Oluseyi, O. Agbelusi

From Island to the City: A Preliminary Archaeological Investigation of Krio and Aku Settlements at Tasso Island and Freetown, Sierra Leone.

Year: 2019

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Contact and Colonialism" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

In May-June 2018, I conducted a preliminary archaeological investigation on Tasso Island and Freetown, Sierra Leone. The goal of this investigation is/was to identify, map and record the archaeological remains of the early colonial period of coastal Sierra Leone, focusing on the Krio and Aku settlements. The Krio and Aku people are descendants of various liberated Africans who settled in Freetown and its neighboring Islands around the late eighteenth century. Limited surface and subsurface surveys reveal scarce data on the location of these settlements, while oral traditions and written records provided additional information on the settlement history. This paper presents the preliminary findings, exploring migration-related issues such as ethnogenesis and processes of colonialism. It also examines possible connections between the Krio and Aku settlements at Freetown and the old settlements identified on Tasso Island. The paper concludes with a discussion on the potential of these settlements and future research directions.

Cite this Record

From Island to the City: A Preliminary Archaeological Investigation of Krio and Aku Settlements at Tasso Island and Freetown, Sierra Leone.. Oluseyi, O. Agbelusi. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, St. Charles, MO. 2019 ( tDAR id: 449094)