Maroon Archaeology Is Public Archaeology

BAT-report 1, 2022

This article is written on request of the St. Eustatius Afrikan Burial Ground Alliance, powered by Ubuntu Connected Front Caribbean (UCF), not as a paid commission but as an act of solidarity. I met the alliance through signing their petition to stop the excavation of the ancestral remains of enslaved Africans near the airport of Sint Eustatius and protest the lack of community involvement. As a white archaeologist I am not writing this article to tell the narrative of the enslaved Africans as I feel the descendent community has to be in control of that narrative. This article concerns the archaeological circumstances in which the protest takes place and tries to shed light on the way forward of dealing with ancestral remains. The ideas I put forward are not new in an international context; the same type of struggles over African burial grounds occur in other places such as St. Helena and Flatbush (NY) at the moment but they are not much discussed in Dutch archaeology. Suggestions are put forward for collaborative archaeology and guidelines for dealing with sensitive archaeology.

Abstract This thesis is written as an orientation on heritage management and archaeology in Suriname. To be able to draw conclusions on this subject, the discussion first is on theoretical insights about heritage management. The theoretical discussion emphasizes the western scholar perspective in heritage management as well as archaeology. This western progressivist evolutionary perspective also has its consequences for policymaking in Suriname. Decisions from the past are of influence in the present. As a result UNESCO World Heritage enlisting of the Paramaribo city centre has led to many initiatives on the level of cultural perception but also is basic to a quite heavy financial and organizational responsibility for Surinamese society. Further heritage policy making must take notion of the existing commitments but also needs orientation on what fits the market economy of the country. Both building a sense of national consciousness and responsibility for the countries vulnerable Indigenous inhabitants and their culture should be taken care of within future policy making. From the before mentioned point of view archaeology and heritage management opens new possibilities. Revitalization of archaeology within Suriname could lead to an awareness of the processes that created present day society and give greater time depth to human presence in Suriname. It has the ability to set Surinamese history stronger within the regions communal past and to create mutual understanding. To emphasize the possibilities of the discipline there should be looked at better implementation of archaeology within existing management frameworks. Also should be undertaken a better societal advertisement of archaeological work. This can only be reached by making archaeology more public within the country. In this manner valuable archaeological information will be spared and cultural perception will increase.

BAT-report 4, 2024

The absence of records and demarcation of the burial of enslaved people in the past is a threat to their preservation in the present. The lack of visibility both in the written en material record has led to the oversight of these burial grounds and consequent protection by law. In this article I will look at the Caribbean island of St Eustatius. The African burial grounds are only discovered during excavation or erosive events such as hurricanes. At these moments the burial sites are usually part of a process that allows little room for preservation. Colonial systems, although covert, are still in place. The inequalities of the past are perpetuated in the present as the descendent communities have little to say in these matters and only through protest can make their voice heard. I want to make some suggestions on how to act in an ethical manner. Inequality in the past should not lead to inequality of present day descendent communities

International Journal of Heritage Studies, 18(5) 2012, pp 495-512., 2012

The present article explores Brazilian ethnic heritage policies in the light of land ownership. While focusing on former Maroon communities – known as the ‘remnants of the Quilombos' – we analyse how and why the general consensus regarding cultural heritage can fall apart in the course of implementing these policies, especially when they appear to interfere with land tenure. In Brazil, most ethnic policies are accompanied by land restitution procedures. Cultural heritage is no longer just a question of identity and memory: it affects the very sensitive question of land reform. By superimposing ethnic claims and land ownership in a country where land distribution remains dramatically unequal, legislators have opened up a Pandora's Box full of promises, frustrations and conflicts.

Journal of Social Archaeology 3(3): 366–398, 2003

The move towards public archaeology counsels archaeologists to work participatively, placing a high priority on educational and developmental activities with local communities in order to share the means of production of historical knowledge and promote the conservation of heritage. Describing key moments in an archaeological project which took these principles as starting points in an indigenous peoples' reserve in northern Brazil, the paper contends that public archaeology is comprised not of a series of goals and activities additional to the task of archaeology, but rather that public archaeology constitutes a wholly different approach to the generation of Journal of Social Archaeology research questions and the production of knowledge. Examining assumptions about empowerment, consultation, heritage, historiography, strategic essentialism and ethics as they affected decisions in the field, the case study demonstrates that, while challenging, participatory research holds significant benefits for the production of knowledge.

Chacmool at 50: The Past, Present, and Future of Archaeology, edited by K. Pennanen and S. Goosney, pp. 84-101. Chacmool Archaeology Association, University of Calgary. Chacmool, 2019

In this paper I take a pragmatic approach to discussing indigenous heritage, which constitutes the focus of most of the archaeology we do in North America. If descendant groups are denied direct and meaningful ways of engaging in decision making concerning their heritage, then heritage management policies are ineffective at best and harmful at worst. My position is based on three points: 1) that access to and control over one􏰎s own heritage is a basic human right essential to their survival; 2) that Indigenous peoples in 􏰌settler countries have historically been separated from their heritage, experienced little benefit from heritage-related research and suffered cultural and spiritual harms and economic loss as a result; and 3) that community-based heritage initiatives are capable of challenging colonial structures in the research process without compromising the integrity of archaeology. My goal here is to discuss the need for a theoretically, ethically and politically viable approach to heritage research with, for and by descendant communities.

Practicing Anthropology, 2009

This discussion highlights the vital role anthropologists have played in negotiating issues of heritage management in the recent Inter- American Court of Human Rights' (IACHR) decision regarding the rights of Saramaka Maroons to ancestral land that was destroyed without the acknowledgement, authority or agreement of Saramaka peoples. The Saramaka, a tribal group living in Suriname, accused the Surinamese government of allowing multi-national logging enterprises to harvest timber from traditional Saramaka territory. In addition to this violation of human rights, the government did not provide a plan following the destruction of Saramaka collective property. In response, the Association of Saramaka Authorities submitted a petition to the Inter-American Commission claiming the government of Suriname did not consider the socio-cultural character, and the subsistence and spiritual relationship the Saramaka have with their environmental heritage. The IACHR judgment1 arms the Saramaka ...

Factors at stake in the returning process of colonial heritage. The case of Suriname and the Netherlands., 2022

Through a historical, institutional, and qualitative study, the thesis seeks to resolve the phase in which the narrative of the return of Surinam's colonial collections from the Netherlands finds itself. By answering questions such as: what are the various reasons that have led the Netherlands to initiate a process of returning its colonial collections? What is the role of the government in the return of these objects? To what extent is Suriname affected by these returns, and what does the return of the objects imply for its community? What is the reception of these objects by Surinamese institutions? Does the return of colonial objects repair the colonial past between Suriname and the Netherlands? The thesis proposes to understand a much deeper problem that connects different parts of a social, political, and institutional triangle in an attempt to make visible the hidden points of these dynamics when returning the pieces. In the social sphere, the current demands that society has been making on museums are raised, questioning their coloniality and the much-needed multivocality in their narratives to recognize the colonial past. It also questions the responsibilities of governments and new policies in the political sphere. Finally, at the institutional level, the work seeks to see the contributions and dispositions of museums on both sides of the pond within their organizations, in which the voice of the interviewees is fundamental to understand this complex structure.

10th ERQ Conference https://erq-conference.soc.unitn.it/, 2025

Heritage research has broadened its scope in the last few decades, shifting attention from conservationist concerns to a more socially engaged field of interdisciplinary inquiry. The paper argues that this change is evidence of the growing importance of Indigenous peoples’ claims to heritage and territorial governance in academia and the public at large. While community-based approaches have been integrated into legislative frameworks and disciplinary practices of 'public engagement' to support the democratisation of heritage imaginaries, ethically oriented methodologies can become trapped in bureaucratic forms and cultural ceremonialism that reinforce the separation between expert and local knowledge. Addressing this question during my fieldwork in the south-central Andes has led to an innovative focus on historicising and mapping pathways to Indigenous sovereignty through the collective memory and materiality of frictional encounters with state and international regimes of heritage conservation. The paper will illustrate the critical potential of archaeological ethnography to unravel the political ontology of heritage through discursive and material connections that strengthen Indigenous governance in the selected case studies. Archaeological ethnography is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry that looks at how long-standing living entanglements between people, places, and things can help to identify and challenge the structural violence against Indigenous territories and lifeworlds.