Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies

Historical and cultural archaeology of the African diaspora examines the material traces left by enslaved and free Black communities across the Americas, reading objects, landscapes, and built environments as evidence of how people navigated, negotiated, and resisted colonial power. Scholars drawing on Black feminist theory have pushed the discipline to account for how race, gender, and social inequality shaped both past lives and the way archaeologists have historically chosen to study and publish about them. Active research is mapping the physical geography of resistance — maroon settlements, hidden caches, repurposed spaces — and recovering the specific experiences of Black women whose stories rarely surface in documentary records. A pressing open question is how to build interpretive frameworks that do not simply retrofit dominant archaeological methods onto communities for whom those methods were never designed.

Works

217,052

Total citations

213,142

Keywords

Black Feminist TheoryAfrican DiasporaArchaeology of ResistanceSocial InequalityCultural IdentityHistorical Landscapes