This article concerns itself with how archaeologists and other heritage studies professionals contend with temporal collapse on landscapes that hold African Diasporic histories. Coral stones lay the foundation of colonial architecture on the island of St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands. This article explores how buildings constructed of coral stones during the colonial era are still in use today, either restored or repurposed, along with examples of how coral is being used as an artistic medium in contemporary sculptures that collapse time and demand heritage studies professionals to tend to the persistence of colonial violence in the present. Here, coral—via the structures built out of it—is discussed as a mnemonic device for the biophysical afterlife of slavery. In this article, linear temporal distinctions of past, present, and future are called into question on St. Croix, where colonial structures act as ruptures in conceptualizations of time and serve as palimpsestual reminders of the past in the present.

This article serves as an introduction to this guest-edited special issue of American Antiquity entitled “Global Archaeologies of the Long Emancipation.” We begin by discussing Rinaldo Walcott's notion of the Long Emancipation, noting how the failed promises of the legal ending of slavery led to sensations of freedom and ongoing forms of anti-Blackness. In response, Black communities have employed various strategies in pursuit of freedom. We then apply this argument to archaeological thought and practice, suggesting that archaeology is well positioned to provide evidence of Black creativity, action, and struggle in a variety of global contexts. The article closes with an overview of this special issue, which includes a brief summary of individual contributions.

In this article, I present the freedom narratives of the diverse enslaved Africans who were liberated from barracoons and captured slave vessels and resettled at Regent Village on the Sierra Leone peninsula in the nineteenth century. Following the British abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade in 1807, the British Royal Navy patrolled the West Atlantic Sea and redirected illegal slave vessels to Sierra Leone, where the Vice-Admiralty Court (which became the Mixed Commissions in 1820) would set them free from slavery. While legally free from bondage, liberated Africans became colonial subjects living in a nascent British colony. What can historical archaeology reveal about the history of freedom among diasporic ethnic identities at Regent Village? I answer this broad question by drawing on historical and archaeological data to demonstrate how people navigated and transformed the village landscape, as well as the decisions and choices they made at the household level, focusing on selected two house loci, which serve as a case study. I concentrate mainly on the identities, experiences, and historical narratives of liberated Africans in the village and extend the discussion to the lives of their descendants who continue to negotiate issues of power and control in contemporary Sierra Leone.

This article stems from the encounter of ancestral stories and archaeological knowledge for Africans in Amazonia. Against colonial fragmentation and anti-Blackness, these theoretical reflections are rooted in Black Archaeology as a praxis of redress. The continuing struggles of ancestral and contemporary Black Amazonian communities, who insist on anti-colonial modes of existence, connect with the need to indigenize the archaeological mode of knowledge through otherwise world-senses as ontoepistemological references. These questions emerged during the first steps of the ongoing collaborative archaeological project Pitit'Latè. The founding story of Mana, an Amazonian village built in 1836 by the hands, heads, spirits, and technologies of more than 400 West Africans captured in the illegal transatlantic trade, serves as the epistemological bones of this research about Black Amazonian territorialities and materialities that remain erased in dominant colonial discourses.

The 2022 bicentennial of the arrival of Black Americans to West African shores was a moment of reflection for many Liberians. In the wake of civil war, many questioned the celebratory tone of the occasion and challenged settler heritage narratives. At the same time, Providence Island featured prominently in official programming. Since 2019, our Back-to-Africa Heritage and Archaeology project has worked on the island to investigate the site's function beyond the mythic 1822 encounter between those seeking freedom from racial injustice in the Americas and Indigenous West Africans, instead offering a more inclusive and complex account of the public heritage space. We specifically focus on deposits that date to the decades prior to, during, and after 1822, demonstrating the tensions surrounding freedom-making and Black Republicanism from past to present, concluding that the binary of pre- and post-settlement fails to capture the complexities of Liberian pasts that unfolded on the island.

Este artigo faz uma análise das práticas portuárias empregadas no comércio de africanos na cidade do Rio de Janeiro durante as duas primeiras décadas do século dezenove. A partir da diferenciação conceitual entre desembarque e descarga final das arqueações de cativos, novos dados obtidos em fontes primárias inéditas foram confrontados com relatos de cronistas e com fontes documentais tradicionalmente conhecidas. Sob essa perspectiva, o texto apresenta um panorama sólido e plausível sobre o processo de importação de escravizados, resgatando a importância do papel da alfândega do Rio de Janeiro como primeiro local de desembarque, e deslocando para o litoral da Saúde, no antigo bairro do Valongo, o local de descarga final das arqueações de africanos. Trata-se, portanto, de um cenário divergente da teoria corrente, segundo a qual o Cais do Valongo, localizado na enseada do Valonguinho, teria sido a porta de entrada dos milhares de cativos africanos que chegaram ao Rio de Janeiro.

This article treats Tio Faustino, a little-known samba musician and Afro-Brazilian religious leader living in Rio de Janeiro, as an entry point for exploring larger questions about Brazil and the African Diaspora. The inquiry expands outward from Tio Faustino to Rio's early twentieth-century markets in ‘African’ commodities, the city's nascent music industry and the growing call to defend intellectual property rights in Brazil. In order to advance their careers, Tio Faustino and other artists accessed nationalist sentiment in ways that highlighted differences rather than commonalities with African-descended peoples elsewhere. In this way, Brazil's global standing and its colonial history and post-colonial trajectory functioned as a counterweight to transnational and diasporic connections. These findings deepen, rather than completely unseat, recent trends in diaspora and transnational studies.