The Liberian Kru in the Atlantic World: A Visual Historical-Archaeological Timeline

Summary

This is a poster submission presented at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The Kru of Liberia are famous in history for their maritime activity throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These sailors were integral parts of the British and American antislavery blockade, and they sailed on vessels in every ocean across the planet, forming new communities called ‘Kru Towns’ in major port cities like Liverpool, Cape Town, Accra, and Freetown, among others. However, the identities and stories of Kru sailors were often misunderstood, deliberately misinterpreted, and misrepresented by colonial and shipboard authorities. Kru maritime history started long before the nineteenth century, when Europeans began to craft racialized narratives about them. A new historical-archaeological project in the Kru homeland of Sinoe County, Liberia seeks to complicate historical narratives about the Kru using material culture and oral history. This poster relies on firsthand archaeological data and historical analysis to build, for the first time, a complete and visual timeline of the Kru history.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025   •
• 2025 SHA Poster Submissions

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow