Chris DeCorse. An archaeologist with research interests in culture contact and change, DeCorse has a primary research interest in the archaeology, ethnohistory, and ethnography of sub-Saharan Africa. “I am interested in how archaeology can help us understand the transformations that occurred in Africa during the period of the Atlantic trade,” he says.  His field experience includes sites in Gambia, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mali, Sierra Leone, Senegal, and Togo. He’s done work, too, at a shipwreck off the coast of Elmina, Ghana, marking the first time archaeologists have surveyed and excavated a shipwreck in West Africa. More recently, DeCorse, who is a professor and current chair of anthropology, has focused his attention on Bunce Island, a tiny land mass in the Sierra Leone river that served as a portal from West Africa to the New World. It’s estimated that 50,000 people passed through Bunce Island, with 10,000 of them sold into slavery in Charleston, S.C.; Savannah, Georgia; and St. Augustine, Florida. In 2006, DeCorse led a three-week expedition to map and document cultural remains on the island.

Theresa Singleton. During the 19th century, Cuba imported about a million enslaved Africans, more than any other Spanish-speaking nation in the Americas. Singleton, associate professor of anthropology, has been conducting an archaeological study of slavery on a coffee plantation in Cuba for nine years, which she expects to bring to a close within a year or so. She is also revisiting earlier archaeological work conducted on slavery in coastal Georgia. “One of the goals of the Georgia Coast work is to connect the present-day community of the Gullah/Geechee people to the archaeology that documents their cultural traditions,” she says. “The Gullah/Geechee are people of African descent who speak a distinct language.” In 2006, the area was declared a Cultural Heritage Corridor, an effort to develop a plan to preserve the Gullah/Geechee heritage, which has been rapidly diminishing because of commercial development in the area and the migration of young adults out of the region

Doug Armstrong. Outside of his work at the Harriet Tubman Home in Auburn, Armstrong has worked on issues related to slavery and freedom for 25 years, including extensive field studies of enslaved populations on Jamaica and the U.S. Virgin Islands. In March, he conducted the first field school at a new project on St. Thomas—a Danish colonial merchant’s house, which Armstrong describes as a “port town urban compound with multiple dwellings that include all levels of society—slaves, who later became laborers; middle managers; traders; and property owners.” The settlement, which existed from approximately 1790 to 1917, had global impact because its residents were trading all around the world. “From the house servants to the owner, it was very multinational. At one point in time not one person was from St. Thomas. It’s a little different than what I’ve done in the past, but kind of exciting to be studying a port town.”