The Archaeology of Race and Slavery: Memory, Monuments, and Memorialization

Catalog description

What does the recent controversy surrounding monuments to the Civil War tell us about race in the past and present? How is slavery remembered, and how can archaeology contribute to our understandings of the experiences of enslavement and freedom? This course will address these questions and others to investigate the archaeological intersections between race, slavery, freedom, memory-making, and memorialization. Using the removal of Confederate monuments as a point of departure, the course seeks to explore how archaeologists study race and slavery through the material record, treating monuments, memorials, and the material traces of slavery as archaeological artifacts that are informative of broader social attitudes concerning race, memory, and nation building.