Aspirational Architecture and AK-47s: The Intersections of Nineteenth-Century Settlement Processes and the Post-Conflict Detritus of Violence in Liberia

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Reckoning with Violence" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Global awareness of Liberia’s recent past is largely limited to the long-term bloodshed that erupted with a 1980 coup and the ensuing civil conflict. What remains understudied is how recent episodes of violence are tethered to the decades following Liberia’s founding as a settler colony of the American Colonization Society in 1822. Our new collaborative project, the first to study archaeologically the Back-to-Africa movement, explores processes of nineteenth-century settlement at sites established by West Indians (Crozierville) and African Americans (Providence Island and Edina). Two field seasons of research highlight the complex ways in which materials associated with the colonizing project are linked with vestiges of recent violence that persist on the post-war landscape. With a specific focus on settler-community architecture, in addition to the material vestiges of civil conflict, this paper highlights the need to understand recent episodes of violence through Liberia's unique history of Back-to-Africa settlement and the Diaspora.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Reckoning with Violence   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 870