Maritime Archaeology and the Slave Trade Towards a Transformative Disciplinary Engagement Reflections from the Slave Wreck’s Project

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.

This paper offers a critical overview of maritime archeology’s limited history of engagement with the slave trade and offers an agenda for an invigorated and socially engaged maritime archeology of the slave trade that can contribute to debates in historiography and to decolonizing scholarship. Scrutinizing the grounds for, and reflecting on the meaning and effects of, the sub-field’s neglect of this theme (McGhee 1997, Webster 2008) , we draw upon the last decade of the Slave Wrecks Project collaboration in South Africa, Mozambique, Senegal, the USA, Brazil, Portugal, and Cuba to propose ways forward for developing a maritime archeology of the slave trade that fosters multiple forms of diversity, new models for stakeholder engagement and heritage protection, and that contributes to scholarship on how enslavement shaped the emergence of the modern world--while critically engaging with the enduring legacies of that past in the present.

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

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow