Teaching Hidden Histories: A VRchaeology Experience of the Miller Grove Community

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Silenced Lifeways:The Archaeology of Free African-American Communities in the Indiana and Illinois Borderlands" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Free African American communities in southern Illinois have complex social histories underwritten by ideas of freedom, slavery and resistance. The compelling dynamics of church, community, and negotiated inter-ethnic experiences faced by our nation’s first generation of free African Americans is a story of both peril and success; conveying its richness in new captivating ways to learners of all ages and backgrounds underlies our current work.  To our expanding repertoire of interactive GIS and artifact-based learning modules, we have added a new VR/AR experiential component based on our current fieldwork. In this paper, we discuss our approach for engaging learners in a virtual experience of Miller Grove. Here, we show how these combined VRchaeological techniques can be used to foster a new public perception of topics like the Underground Railroad and early free African American communities through interactive VR/AR experience.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2019   •
• Silenced Lifeways:The Archaeology of Free African-American Communities in the Indiana and Illinois Borderlands

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 285