(Re)Framing Colonial Histories and the African Diaspora through a Restorative Archaeology.

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Africa’s Discovery of the World from Archaeological Perspectives: Revisiting Moments of First Contact, Colonialism, and Global Transformation", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The arrival of the First Africans in English North America in 1619 marked a pivotal moment for the Virginia colony, for their arrival and labor secured the permanency and expansion of the colony itself. Previous Anglocentric narratives of seventeenth-century Virginia neglected the origin, identity, and intercultural and intracultural relations of African people. The call for a more equitable and ethical archaeology raises the question – How can archaeologists better address the impermeable curtain of colonial ideology within archaeological methodologies, terminologies, and foundations of the field? By placing two seventeenth-century Virginia sites within the context of theories like settler colonialism, I trace forgotten connections to Central African origins, cross-cultural entanglements, and connections between the African Diaspora and European colonizers. Similarly, I examine how archaeologists and descendant communities are developing shared goals to dismantle a Eurosupremacist paradigm of the colonial past, and, ultimately, promote a restorative archaeological knowledge production.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023   •
• Africa’s Discovery of the World from Archaeological Perspectives: Revisiting Moments of First Contact, Colonialism, and Global Transformation

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow