Freedom Narratives: Illegal Slavery, Liminal Spaces, and Nascent Colonialism on the Freetown Peninsula.

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Global Archaeologies of the Long Emancipation", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

While many archaeological studies examine the impacts of the Atlantic slave trade on West African communities, archaeological research on tension for freedom in the region has been limited. No archaeological studies have analysed how anti-slavery or struggle for abolition set the stage for colonialism in the region. This paper employs a theoretical framework that connects colonial entanglements, cross-cultural exchange, and materialities to explore how the lives of around 100,000 Africans who were ‘liberated’ from ships embarking from different parts of the West African coast and resettled in a nascent British Crown Colony in Freetown were entangled in the broader regional and global political economy— an understudied area of Africa’s intersection with the wider Atlantic World. It presents and synthesizes a new range of archival and archaeological data on settlement patterns, household socio-economic activities, and trade relations at Regent Village based on a collaborative project conducted over a two-year period.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023   •
• Global Archaeologies of the Long Emancipation

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow