section_path: Current issues and controversy/African diaspora archaeology
section_name: African diaspora archaeology
paragraph_text: African diaspora archaeology
  
  African Diaspora Archaeology is an area of study within the subfield of historical archaeology that studies those that have been forcibly transported through the Atlantic Slave Trade, the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade, and the Indian Ocean Slave Trade, as well as their descendants. Although of global relevance, most research has been conducted in the Americas and Africa.
  
  In the United States, Similar to the experience of Native Americans, the history of African diaspora archaeology is one of controversies over Whiteness in archaeology and anthropology, a lack of inclusion of the African descendant community, and possession of human remains in the collections of universities and museums. In the 1990s, anthropologist Michael Blakey was the director of research during the New York African Burial Ground Project where he initiated a protocol for collaborating with the African descendant community. In 2011, the Society of Black Archaeologists was created in the United States. Co-founders Ayana Omilade Flewellen, archaeologist at the University of California, Riverside and Justin Dunnavant, archaeologist and assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles intend to build a restorative justice-based structure in archaeology. They suggest to define descendants not only in genealogical terms, but also to welcome input of African Americans whose ancestors had a shared historical experience in enslavement.
  
  The United States Senate unanimously passed a bill in December 2020 that centers African American cemeteries at risk in South Carolina. The bill is made to better protect historic African burial grounds and can lead to the creation of an African American Burial Grounds Network. Barbados, eight days after becoming a republic on November 30, 2021, announced plans for the construction of the Newton Enslaved Burial Ground Memorial as well as a museum dedicated to the history of the Atlantic slave trade. The Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye is to lead the project that is to commemorate an estimated 570 West Africans buried in unmarked graves at the site of the former Newton sugar plantation. Barbados can be seen as a good example of respectful preservation of an African burial ground. Throughout the Americas however the burial grounds are in danger of being destroyed or human remains are being excavated without the descendant community being involved. In 2022, residents on Sint Eustatius, Dutch Caribbean spoke out strongly against what they found were unethical excavations of their ancestors on the Godet African Burial Ground and the Golden Rock African Burial Ground.