A hybrid fellow’s forum with Simone Muhammad, MA Student in Anthropology at California State University, Fullerton from August 28, 2023. Recording available.
About the Presentation
The lives and activities of African and African-descended peoples on St. Croix have largely been minimized in historic texts despite serving as the foundation for Denmark’s economic prosperity through the Atlantic Slave Trade. While scholars have known about the production of Afro-Caribbean ceramics since the 1960s, researchers failed to recognize Afro-Crucian’s own pottery-making traditions until Richard Gartley’s foundational “Afro-Cruzan Pottery: A New Style of Colonial Earthenware from St. Croix” (1979). Still, St. Croix continues to be woefully underrepresented in Afro-Caribbean ware studies, with basic questions such as clay sources and trade patterns remaining unanswered. This project seeks to clarify production and distribution of Afro-Caribbean ceramics on St. Croix in tangent with Afro-Crucian cultural identity during the era of slavery through a combination of macroscopic and elemental ceramic analysis, oral histories, and archival research. To establish these components of Afro-Crucian ceramic traditions builds the capacity to recognize and memorialize the experiences and historic contributions of the African peoples who lived and labored on St. Croix.
About Simone Muhammad
Simone is a current MA student in Anthropology at California State University, Fullerton. She earned her BA in Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, where she developed her interests in heritage conservation, culture change and continuity, and decolonization. As an undergraduate, her research initially focused on Nahua-Pipil historic sites listed on El Salvador’s tentative list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites. She developed her skills in historic artifact identification and analysis through her employment as a museum technician at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, as well as a URAP apprentice at the Central American Archaeology Laboratory to enhance the finding aid within the Archivo General de Centroamérica for relevant indigenous artifacts and records.
For her master’s thesis, Simone shifts her focus to African diaspora archaeology and ceramic analysis to examine pottery traditions among enslaved African and African-descended peoples on St. Croix, USVI. A woefully underdeveloped region in Afro-Caribbean ware studies, she hopes to answer fundamental questions of clay sourcing and distribution of locally produced pottery for “Afro-Crucian” ware. Ultimately, her research aims to establish a basic understanding of Afro-Crucian ceramic production, exchange, and use to advance future research of Afro-Crucian identity and history. Simone currently conducts fieldwork with St. Croix’s Estate Little Princess Archaeological Project under the Society of Black Archaeologist, and partners with the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery as an ICJS fellow for training in ceramic composition and attribute analysis.
As a historical archaeologist, Simone recognizes the importance of collaboration with community members and organizations in archaeology as decolonized archaeological practice. So, she plans to expand her involvement in community-based, participatory research to accurately represent pre- and post-emancipation life for Afro-Crucians. Her firsthand experience with underrepresentation in archaeology motivates her to spotlight heritage sites for marginalized people as an opportunity to promote descendant community involvement in the archaeological research process.