This forum builds on the discussion stimulated during an online salon in which the authors participated on June 25, 2020, entitled “Archaeology in the Time of Black Lives Matter,” and which was cosponsored by the Society of Black Archaeologists (SBA), the North American Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG), and the Columbia Center for Archaeology. The online salon reflected on the social unrest that gripped the United States in the spring of 2020, gauged the history and conditions leading up to it, and considered its rippling throughout the disciplines of archaeology and heritage preservation. Within the forum, the authors go beyond reporting the generative conversation that took place in June by presenting a road map for an antiracist archaeology in which antiblackness is dismantled.
Building a new anti-racist archaeology will require an unprecedented level of structural changes in the practices, demographics, and power relations of archaeology. This article considers why this iteration of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) Movement is proving to be unique in terms of its potential to transform the field. We discuss how anti-racist archaeologists arrived at this juncture prepared to meet the challenges now before us, and how members of the Society of Black Archaeologists are collaborating with others to enact change. We acknowledge the significant social justice efforts of others and suggest how archaeologists can get involved to keep this critical momentum going.
ast month, shocking news reports revealed that what are thought to be the skeletal remains of Tree and Delisha Africa, two Black girls killed in a US police bombing in 1985, might have been studied for years by researchers at two US universities, without their families' permission. The finding, involving the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and Princeton University in New Jersey, is just the latest in a series of discoveries in university collections related to the mistreatment of African American human remains.A week earlier, the University of Pennsylvania announced that it would rebury the remains of more than 50 enslaved people held in its anthropology museum. In January, Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, announced that it was creating a committee to consider policies around its museum collections after the discovery of the remains of 15 people who were enslaved. In 2017, the University of Virginia in Charlottesville acknowledged that it had lost track of grave-robbed remains from African American cemeteries, which the medical school had once used for anatomical study 1 .The call for institutional accountability over African American remains in academic collections comes at a time when the US Congress will soon convene hearings on the African American Burial Grounds Network Act. This bill would survey and offer recommendations for the protection of African American burial grounds. It is a good first step.Although this could become one of the most significant pieces of legislation in the fight to safeguard Black heritage, the United States needs much stronger laws to respectfully care
Since the birth of the Transatlantic slave trade, enslaved Africans have exploited their geographic circumstances to obtain liberation, effectively transforming them into maroons. However, geographies of marronage have disproportionately investigated terrestrial landscapes to understand how self‐liberated Africans made life in the Atlantic world. Turning our attention to the sea, I use geospatial analyses to map ocean currents and explore routes of passage for maritime maroons from the island of St. Croix (Ay Ay). Mapping this oceanic cartography of Black fugitivity provides renewed insight into the ways in which maroons used oceanic literacy to actualise their quest for freedom and their experiences in their new homes.
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