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Spring 2012 Newsletter The Ephemerality of African Diasporic Materiality

The material record of the African Diaspora in the Gulf Coast and Circum-Caribbean is all too often ephemeral, elided, or erased. Interactions in this region, increasingly structured through hierarchical relations, resulted in new (some might say hybridized) modes of living and relating among the various African, European, and Native peoples. Our efforts to identify and explore, much less understand, the resulting complexity and cosmopolitanism are hindered by a legacy of racist hegemony: less substantive archaeological sites and the reification of past bias through site evaluation processes that do not account for the impact of past racism on site formation. In both overt and less-obvious systemic ways, the subjectivity and materiality of African descended persons are considered, literally and figuratively, to be immaterial in a world still largely under racist hegemony. Late 20th and early 21st century events, from the mainstream media characterization of post-earthquake Haiti and post-Katrina New Orleans, to the initial treatment of the African Burial Ground (New York City) provide examples of the continuation of racist hegemony. An examination of current site evaluation processes in the United States informed by Critical Race Theory reveals the systemic bias of a superficially fair set of criteria and processes. The material record of the African Diaspora in the Gulf Coast and Circum-Caribbean region has played a critical role in deepening our understanding, and correcting gaps and misrepresentations, of the histories and contributions of persons of African descent in the region. All too often, however, this material record is ephemeral, erased, or elided (Barile 2004; Blakey 2004; Palmer 2011b; Wilkie et al. 2010; Yelvington 2001). If we think in terms of the flow of time, then this relative lack of materiality leaves us in far too many situations chasing the settling particles of its fading slipstream. Why are African Diaspora archaeological sites disproportionately ephemeral? Because taphonomy or site formation is not a neutral process, but influenced by culture, and thus it projects contemporary biases limiting access to material goods, food, property, and other tangibles onto the material record as expressions of the doxa of the time. This results in the ephemerality of African Diaspora landscapes in the region, particularly pre- and early post