BU Archeologist Andreana Cunningham Addresses Gaps in the Recorded History of Enslaved People
In the mid to late 1800s, the remote British overseas territory of Saint Helena was home to a community of “liberated Africans”—enslaved people from ships intercepted during the British Royal Navy’s suppression of the Atlantic slave trade and rerouted to the small island about 1,000 miles off the coast of Southern Africa.
Nearly a third of the African people who landed on Saint Helena died soon thereafter, the result of mistreatment on board the slavers’ ships. They were buried in an area at the northern edge of the island, where their remains lay undisturbed until 2006, when workers began to build an airport access road. A team of archaeologists was called in to assess the extent of the gravesite and, after two and a half months, more than 300 complete skeletons were exhumed—a mere fraction of those buried in the area—and the road moved elsewhere.
The excavated remains were held in storage and made available for a limited number of research projects—including one by Andreana Cunningham, a Boston University College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of archaeology, anthropology, and African American and Black diaspora studies…
To read more, visit THE BRINK, where this article originally appeared on August 13, 2024.