Liberia was established by free Black Americans supported by the American Colonization Society in 1822, becoming Africa’s first Republic in 1847. Since that time, the Liberian experiment has offered celebratory examples of Black nation building, as well as a devastating Civil War, with the latter partly stemming from inequities in state power. This paper therefore asks, did the establishment and maintenance of Liberian sovereignty involve or require the subjugation of its mostly Indigenous population? This paper presents archaeological approaches to the complexities and contradictions to Liberian sovereignty. Sites, landscapes, architecture, artifacts, and commemorations are considered in order to highlight the various ways in which Liberians of different backgrounds experienced statecraft, whether acting as its agent or critiquing its oppressive tendencies. I argue that geopolitical framings of the Liberian state and past belie deep tensions in how Liberians envisioned sovereignty.

The widespread lack of public knowledge about sovereignty, particularly in Black and Brown communities, is not incidental but is a part of a history of erasure that enacts psychological violence. This epistemic disempowerment disrupts intergenerational memory, severing ties to land, collective agency, and promotes rewriting of false or incomplete histories. This paper introduces the concept of colognition: a cognitive framework shaped by distortions inherited or developed under colonial regimes, where perception of self and reality are filtered through the logics of domination.

Colonialism and the enslavement of Indigenous and African people are often taught through the lens of white supremacy. This lens centers narratives of conquest while over emphasizing the violence endured by Black and Indigenous peoples to uphold the myth of passive victimhood. As anthropologists, we have the tools to possibly support marginalized communities in imagining future sovereignties by illuminating historical narratives that exist beyond the Euro-colonial scope.

Since 2013, I’ve collaborated with predominantly Yukatek Maya community members from the historic parish where one of the most successful anticolonial, Indigenous insurrections mounted in the Americas began. By recasting Mayanist archaeologies as Indigenous archaeology, we’ve attempted to resist the conventional settler colonial logics of archaeological practice in this space. Here I’ll focus on the roads, routes, and negative spaces we encountered during our regional surveys, archival reconnaissance, and storytelling sessions that show how the shifting geographies of the long 19th century contributed to both how the Maya Social War materialized and how its aftermath laid the foundations for today’s social geographies. I argue that as the war transitioned into a separatist movement reclaiming Maya sovereignty across southern Yucatan, insurrectionists engaged in crucial infrastructural projects that undermined state attempts at regaining control in the region and offered alternatives—however short-lived—to the Iberian-inherited settler colonial system they were working against.

This paper examines how belongings held in museum collections across the Pacific Northwest are entangled among people, practices, and places. Drawing from Black feminist and Indigenous scholarship, we position intersectionality and relationality as critical methodologies for reconnecting belongings to the place-based practices from which they emerged. We draw on Indigenous relational paradigms as an approach to sovereignty. This approach predates the nation-state and highlights our ethical commitments to the lands, waters, and communities. Building on these approaches we frame intersectionality not only as an analytic of identity, but as an archaeological method for examining belongings. This allows us to see how race, gender, and coloniality shape what is collected, how it is interpreted, and its connection to lived experiences today. We argue that by treating belongings as living relations rather than static archives or artifacts, we can imagine new futures grounded in accountability to our communities, land, and collective liberation.

This paper explores the entangled histories and contemporary claims of Black settler descendants and Indigenous communities on the Sierra Leone peninsula, a former British Crown Colony. Grounded in archaeological fieldwork, oral histories, and archival research, the study traces how land dispossession, racialized narratives of erasure, and the legacy of colonial resettlement have shaped contemporary struggles over belonging and sovereignty. Indigenous land reclamation efforts, while grounded in ancestral rights and sovereignty, often frame Black settlers—resettled by the British after emancipation and their descendants—as outsiders and minorities. However, these communities also assert a strong sense of self-determination. This dichotomy exposes a complex landscape of sovereignty, one structured by landlord-stranger hierarchies and the enduring logics of anti-Blackness and settler colonialism. Moving beyond binary framings, the paper advocates for a relational anthropology of mutuality, one that foregrounds plural histories and lived experiences as pathways toward inclusive and liberatory futures in the postcolonial state.

Various threats to Black bodies and burial grounds has moved growing numbers to consider ways to more actively legislate, organize, and manage cemeteries and human remains (ancestral and otherwise). Black bodies and burial grounds present opportunities to do various things, including ponder sovereignties as modes of Black-Indigenous commensurability. But other important questions add depth and wider scope to this search for common grounds. For example, how can archaeologists better grasp the more-than-human dimension of other worldly sovereignties? At what scales do overlapping and competing cemetery sovereignties become salient and negotiated? How can small or no-longer-active communities be provided assistance in stewarding burial grounds? Do burial grounds and “grave goods” ever attain object sovereignty?

This paper explores the use of oysters by the 18th-century free Black inhabitants of Fort Mose in St. Augustine, Florida as a means of enacting and embodying sovereignty within a contested colonial landscape. The use of oysters, as both nourishment and infrastructure, at the site reflects the intersection of maroon and Indigenous knowledge systems and experiences. The self-liberators who established Fort Mose shared both a lived environment, the coastal saltmarshes, and a common enemy, the British Carolinians, with the local Timucua population. Yet, their repurposing of Indigenous oyster landscapes, already bearing spiritual, territorial, and historical meaning, complicates any narrative of shared resistance. In this context, oysters become a site of both convergence and friction, a constantly shifting ‘shoal,’ in the words of Tiffany Lethabo King (2019), where Black and Indigenous relationships to land and survival coalesce and diverge.

On September 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria made landfall on the Caribbean island of Dominica and then devastated Puerto Rico. The aftermath of this catastrophic event in these two settings revealed how differences in land and food sovereignty can result in varied outcomes in post-disaster community resilience; these outcomes reflect particular historical trajectories rooted in colonial-capitalism. Here, we are concerned with the history of Indigenous and Black in/securities regarding access and availability of both land and food in Dominica. European colonial powers intentionally disrupted Indigenous and African food systems and land management practices, seeking to impose subsistence systems that benefited colonial interests. Our research examines sites of refuge among Indigenous, enslaved, and maroon communities, revealing how food sovereignty has played a key role in liberation efforts that resisted colonial exploitation. We also connect these legacies to contemporary challenges of food sovereignty in the face of development, extraction, and climate change.

Foreign governments frequently rationalize extracting both tangible and intangible heritage from former colonial entities in the Americas as acts of stewardship, often setting their own standards for conservation and preservation without cultural or regional specificity. Nevertheless, communities actively evaluate their needs and values, documenting, collecting, preserving, and sharing their histories despite this ongoing trend of extraction. This dynamic is particularly evident on St. Croix, USVI, where traditional local heritage stewardship practices are disavowed, and island residents face limited access to their own history, heritage, as both tangible and intangible island heritage have been removed from the former colonies and relocated to institutions in mainland United States and Denmark. This paper explores how integrating community-rooted stewardship practices and heritage management plans ensures that archaeological work undertaken in a post-colonial context is centered on community needs and incorporates local desires for conservation and preservation into the long-term goals of a project.