The Material Culture of Back-to-Africa: Object Reinvention in the Development of Africa's First Republic

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Reinvent, Reclaim, Redefine: Considerations of "Reuse" in Archaeological Contexts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Nineteenth-century Black American and Caribbean settlers of the Back-to-Africa movement to Liberia brought with them a wide variety of objects for building new lives and landscapes for their emancipatory and civilizing mission in West Africa. The migrants arrived to lands already inhabited by people long accustomed to European trading and possessing their own Indigenous material traditions. Recent excavations in Liberia by the Back-to-Africa Heritage and Archaeology Project have begun to untangle the complex assemblages of material culture on settlement era sites. These include Providence Island, the location of the temporary settlement of 1822 in Monrovia, to the town of Crozierville, settled by Barbadians in 1865. Here, we discuss artifacts with second lives: objects employed in new contexts, used and reused in strategic ways. From British refined earthenwares with extensive wear and modification, to locally made clay pots, migrants and Indigenous Liberians adapted their domestic toolkits as new lifestyles and identities were forged in Africa’s first republic.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Reinvent, Reclaim, Redefine: Considerations of "Reuse" in Archaeological Contexts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40215.0