St. Croix, U.S.V.I.
Since 2015, the Slave Wrecks Project has developed a network of collaborators in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, devoted to exploring the history and legacies of slavery and freedom there. Our ongoing work in St. Croix includes physical and digital exhibitions, terrestrial archaeology, and ongoing training for our global collaborators and students.
Since 2015, the Slave Wrecks Project (SWP) has developed a network of collaborators and explored the history of slavery and freedom in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. SWP and partners work to advance terrestrial and maritime archaeological investigations, dive training, and underwater heritage monitoring and analysis in the U.S.V.I. In 2019, the SWP conducted exhibition development, interpretation, and community outreach in St. Croix, telling fuller stories about our shared history. The ongoing terrestrial field school at the Estate Little Princess led by SWP collaborator Society of Black Archaeologists continued the archaeological and architectural investigation of enslaved persons’ presence at the estate and the continued community and student training in field methodology. In 2019, archaeologists discovered two new structures on the site.
Crucian Students in the archaeological field school excavating a unit. Estate Little Princess, St. Croix, July 2019. Photo by Alexandra Jones, Archaeology in the Community.
Beginning in 2015, SWP partners National Park Service – Submerged Resources Center (NPS-SRC) and Southeast Archeological Center (NPS-SEAC) inventoried all of Buck Island Reef National Monument in search for the ships General Abercrombie and Mary, which wrecked while engaged in the slave trade. NPS leveraged a partnership with the U.S. Department of State to turn this effort into a peer-to-peer training of SWP partners from Senegal, Mozambique, and South Africa from 2015 through 2017. These SWP partners worked together to discover two shipwrecks and multiple historic anchors potentially associated with as many as five additional shipwrecks. A photograph of one of the anchors being documented was part of the inaugural SWP exhibit at the SI-NMAAHC.
SEAC also conducted ground penetrating radar survey across 80 percent of the grounds at Christiansted National Historic Site, including the entire original portion of the Danish West India and Guinea Company Warehouse complex, which enslaved people built and in which they dwelled and worked. SWP participants; interns from the University of the Virgin Islands, an historically black college and university; and local students in the Youth Conservation Corps and Greening Youth Program helped excavate part of the complex to reveal features associated with living and work areas of the enslaved. Work at the park and at Estate Little Princess allowed for collaborative efforts, profitable discussions, and networking among the students. These efforts helped lead to two workshops focused on community stewardship and site protection.
SEAC and Christiansted National Historic Site collaborated with the SI-NMAAHC to develop three sets of museum exhibits. SWP is developing a collaborative virtual exhibition at the Christiansted National Historic Site with our partners, telling the story of slavery and freedom in St. Croix, which will launch in 2024. It will illustrate the work of the international partnership over the course of the five years working on land, underwater, and in communities, fostering new knowledge directly with students about the history and legacy of slavery in St. Croix.
Global partners of SWP are joined in the U.S. Virgin Islands by a host of local and regional partners and collaborators. They include the Christiansted National Historic Site; the Society of Black Archaeologists; the University of the Virgin Islands; Jr Scientists in the Sea; Crucian Heritage and Nature Tourism (CHANT); Caribbean Center for Boys and Girls of the Virgin Islands; Department of Planning and Natural Resources; The Nature Conservancy; University of California’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities Initiative; University of California, Santa Cruz; United States Virgin Islands; and Virgin Islands State Historic Preservation Office. Throughout all of these efforts, SWP works to support ongoing efforts toward preserving, researching, and interpreting the important cultural heritage of the Caribbean related to histories and sites of slavery and freedom.
