Toward a Transformative Maritime Archaeology of the Slave Trade: Reflections from the Slave Wrecks Project Research Programs in Mozambique and South Africa

Summary

This is an abstract from the "To Move Forward We Must Look Back: The Slave Wrecks Project at 10 Years" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Drawing on work in Mozambique and South Africa undertaken over the last five years this paper examines how the Slave Wrecks Project’s field research program and its stakeholder engagement initiatives have come to inform each other in profoundly transformative ways. Our investigations of specific slaver shipwrecks have compelled a reconceptualization of notions of “the site” itself and of research strategies for addressing the “Black Atlantic,” while also underwriting complex reconsiderations of concepts of “heritage," “stake” and “stakeholder,” ”community,” “engagement,” and “memory.” SWP’s emerging approach has drawn from sources as diverse as South African critiques of apartheid’s “heritage legacy” and Mozambican cultural scripts for contending with historical violence. We reflect on the signature approach emerging from this struggle to be “ethical social navigators” in contexts where stakeholders may disagree with researchers and each other about the past’s meanings; about the merits of, or methods for, its recovery; and about the disposition of tangible vestiges of the lived past in the living present. In conclusion we call for a transformative maritime archaeology of the slave trade that will challenge maritime archaeology—both analytically and as a socially embedded practice, critically contending with colonial and nationalist legacies that have implicitly shaped it.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• To Move Forward We Must Look Back: The Slave Wrecks Project at 10 Years   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32914