Carolina Slave Trade and Enslavement: Exploring Black Sacred Spaces, Shipwrecks, Shipyards, and Shipping Records

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Maritime Archeology of the Slave Trade: Past and Present Work, and Future Prospects", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Several projects and research-in-progress address slave trade in North Carolina. Port records yield information about human cargoes entering local customs districts with details about demographics and venues, with strong links to West Indies slave trade depots. Other projects include archaeological and historical research along inland waterways and coastal islands where enslaved communities played a role in an array of industrial activities. These include boat piloting, agriculture, shipbuilding, and naval stores procurement – both contributing towards and benefitting from the slave trade economy. Historical and archaeological research on shipwrecks include the Queen Anne’s Revenge 31CR314 (1717), previously La Concorde French slave ship, and identifying more sites of slave shipwrecks in the larger context of the Carolinas for future research. Amongst the most important current initiatives is the North Carolina African American Heritage Commission's Africa to Carolina initiative serving to identify, acknowledge, sites where enslaved Africans disembarked.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Maritime Archeology of the Slave Trade: Past and Present Work, and Future Prospects   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow