Affiliation: University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Professor Whitney Battle-Baptiste is a Professor of Anthropology at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Center at UMass Amherst. She holds degrees from Virginia State University (BA), the College of William and Mary (MA) and University of Texas, Austin (PhD). Professor Battle-Baptiste’s research interests include historical archaeology, African diaspora archaeology, and Black feminist theory. She has worked on a number of historic sites across the Eastern United States, including Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage Plantation in Nashville, Tennessee; Rich Neck Plantation in Williamsburg, Virginia; the Abiel Smith School in Boston, Massachusetts; and the W. E. B. Du Bois Homesite in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. She examines historical African diaspora sites through the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality, during slavery and post-emancipation, and community-based methods are central to her archaeological practice and pedagogy. Some of Professor Battle-Baptiste’s notable publications include Black Feminist Archaeology (2011), and W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America, co-edited with Britt Russert (2019). She is one of the AIA Norton Lecturers for the 2024/2025 National Lecture Program season.
As bicentennial celebrations continued across the country, a new subfield of Historical Archaeology was also forming. There was an increased effort to understand the material remains of what made us a nation of many. African American archaeology began as an extension of the effort to understand the lives of ordinary people. As practioners, we often focus on the work on plantations across the South, yet African American Archaeology did not have its roots on the plantation, it started with a field site in Andover, Massachusetts. In 1942 Ripley and Adelade Bullen were in search of evidence of possible Indigenous sites but discovered the homesite of Lucy Foster. A woman born into slavery, freed and eventually a part of a vibrant Andover community. Her story was not only unique, but it was also the first of its kind. This is the story of Lucy Foster, Adelaide Bullen, and a group of students who in wanted to tell her story and make a rightful place in Massachusetts colonial history to never be forgotten again.
In her lecture “the way we lived was shaped by objects”: Contemporary Reflections on Black Materiality, Whitney Battle-Baptiste discusses how her first book, Black Feminist Archaeology (2011) presents the components of a methodological tool kit to highlight how Americanist archaeologists can engage issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality. She also wanted archaeologists to amplify how identity and life experiences bring archaeologists to ask different questions of their data, employ multiple perspectives on material, and maintain an honest dialogue with colleagues and the communities they work with. She hoped her words would help to shift towards a more inclusive historical analysis that took into consideration how the past and the present are connected. Sites are no longer the only spaces where archaeologists are working. In the theory that we are in a moment where the “past is not past,” the power of archaeology is more important than ever.
