This Ground Beneath My Feet: Archaeology and Art at Walker's Dairy, Barbados

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Co-Producing Space: Relational Approaches to Agrarian Landscapes, Labor, Commodities, and Communities", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Unearthing Voices explores plantation life in Barbados through a collaboration between archaeologists and an artist working to bridge the materialities of race-based slavery into the contemporary, post-Emancipation Caribbean. At Walker’s Dairy in St. George, Barbados, the collection of vessels and tools used in sugar production and household activities highlights the intersection of daily life and the afterlives of slavery in the postcolonial present. These intersections, including those of art and archaeology, allow for long-form, historically informed narratives honoring efforts to analyze documentary sources critically and interpret archaeological investigations to produce more expansive content outside academia. Artistic partnerships can facilitate transdisciplinary ways of knowing and accounting for these stories of survival, commodification, and death due to archaeology’s attention to quotidian life through considering the trauma of enslavement. This paper outlines the co-production of archaeological knowledge and artistic practice at Walker’s Dairy over the five years of the Unearthing Voices project.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• Co-Producing Space: Relational Approaches to Agrarian Landscapes, Labor, Commodities, and Communities

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow