Archaeologists And College Students Discover History Through Digging At Fort Christianvaern

ST. CROIX — For four weeks, National Parks Service archaeologists along with college students from the University of the Virgin Islands, San Antonio Texas, and Aarhus, Denmark –in the group pic above — have been digging various segments of land at Fort Christianvaern, in search of foundations of the slave residences that existed within the Guinea West India Company Warehouse/Slave Market complex in the late 1700s.

But the digs are more than just dotting history; NPS archaeologist Meredith Hardy, acting culture research manger in Christiansted, said N.P.S., which has partnered with the Smithsonian of African American History and Culture on the Slave Wrecks Project — an international effort to first look at ships that were carrying African slaves and their wrecks, and using them as a teaching opportunity to build local capacity in other countries — is in search of stories of lifestyle told through the artifacts.

The effort has been expanded to the western hemisphere, with St. Croix being the first place where Slave Wrecks has done any work — moving form water to land.

After mapping, digging and finding artifacts, the question becomes, “What can you find from these artifacts,” Ms. Hardy said. “How does this tell us about the people who lived here. How do these things help us tell that story about how people were living everyday.”

The artifacts findings revealed that the slaves received items from China, England and Germany. The archaeologists and students also learned that the salves ate cows, had horses and drank liquor, among other traits.

“So you break your button, well, you get some bones and you make your own button,” Ms. Hardy said, explaining how slaves found solutions to certain problems. “This is just a little slice of what it was like to live everyday here in the late 1700s.”

The idea is to get a complete story from voyage to arrival and present day.

“We’re taking the story from the wrecks, their transportation, to what happened when they arrived,” Ms. Hardy told The Consortium on Wednesday following a brief press conference at Fort Christianvaern. “The future plans are not just to look at the period of slavery, but then emancipation, and then post emancipation, and then looking at the legacy all the way up to today.”

The continuation into emancipation and present day living is especially important, Ms. Hardy said, noting the eruption of racial tensions on the U.S. mainland ignited by recent fatal incidents involving black Americans and White police officers.

“We look at all of the eruptions, and how much of that is rising up because there’s no dialogue about what happened in the past. So that’s what we’re trying to do here is begin that dialogue. And an easy way to do it is to handle the artifacts,” she said.

About the Slave Wrecks Project:

Since 2010, the Slave Wrecks Project (SWP) has fostered public and scholarly understanding of the role of the African slave trade in shaping global history by using maritime archeology as the vehicle for examining enslavement and its far-reaching global impacts. The archeological investigation of slaver shipwrecks and related terrestrial sites, such as markets in which the enslaved were sold like Christiansted National Historic Site, maroon sites and encampments, and free black communities, promises to provide a new perspective to bear on our understanding of the Trans-Atlantic and Indian Ocean trades in enslaved people and on the central role that this process played in constituting the modern world.

The SWP is an international network of researchers and institutions that combines collaborative maritime exploration and investigation with training, heritage protection, exhibits, and education to build and share new knowledge about the history of the global slave trade. SWP partners work in museums and in archives, on coastlines, and in the sea in a dynamic approach to public history that intersects with the latest in science, archaeology, anthropology, and historical research. SWP is building a global network with local and regional roots and works in a growing list of locations from Mozambique to South Africa to St. Croix, Senegal, Brazil, and Cuba.