Pitit’Latè: Anticolonial Archaeology of Afroguianese Lands, Things, and Memories

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.

Increasingly, the study of Global Black and Afrodiasporic placemaking strategies appears to be of interest to archaeologists. Yet, the focus on these past stories also reveals countless colonial wounds and contemporary structures of violence which the archaeological discipline oftentimes is complicit in maintaining. Rather than being restricted to eurowestern chronological and ontoepistemological categories, building an anticolonial framework for archaeological research requires working from the continuities and connections between the historical trauma and ongoing struggles of communities. This paper approaches past and present relations with the land of Moun’Mana, an Afroguianese community founded by Africans illegally made captive in the first half of the nineteenth century. Through the invoking of stories and materialities of the relations with the land, continuing struggles towards autonomy and self-sustainability are made explicit within various reconfigurations of colonial domination over generations, thereby raising ethical and epistemological concerns regarding concrete possibilities for a less violent archaeological science.

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