The Archaeology of Liberia’s Providence Island beyond 1822 Settlement

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Critical Archaeologies of Whiteness", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Dozoa or Providence Island has long served as a meeting ground along the West African coast. Indigenous groups traded and potentially used the site for rites associated with secret societies. The site later served as a trading outpost, with European merchants eager to exchange goods, including human cargo. In this paper, we discuss recent findings associated with the Back-to-Africa Heritage & Archaeology (BAHA) project to foreground Indigenous use of the site and the complex relationships forged between West African societies and arriving settlers in 1822. African American settlers arrived on Dozoa in that year, setting the stage for the founding of the Republic of Liberia in 1847. Referred to as “Liberia’s Plymouth Rock,” this paper also examines the settler colonial founding myths that have been reanimated by recent bicentennial celebrations. We argue that these white-adjacent heritage narratives obscure more accurate renderings of the Liberian past revealed through our archaeological project.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• Critical Archaeologies of Whiteness

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow