A Future That Does Not Forget: Collaborative Archaeology in the Colonial Context of Sint Eustatius (Dutch Caribbean)

marjolijn kok is an artist and independent researcher with a PhD in archaeology. Her projects concern protest movements and postcolonial issues, including the 90 habitation camps of Moluccan people in the Netherlands after the independence of Indonesia (see the Dutch website www.molukserfgoed.com)

We searched online for marjolijn contact details after she left a comment at the online petition: 

"We still lack the debate about colonial practices in Dutch archaeology. So stop when asked by descendants."

The sentence stuck with us. We got acquainted and we clicked immediately. In the meantime marjolijn has been part of the 'St. Eustatius Afrikan Burial Ground Alliance' for almost six months and we learned a great deal from her about archaeology and community collaboration. Although marjolijn was not familiar with archaeology in the Caribbean, she wrote a very insightful article about the controversial Golden Rock excavations in St. Eustatius. 

From the introduction:

"This article is written on request of the St. Eustatius Afrikan Burial Ground Alliance, powered by Ubuntu Connected Front Caribbean (UCF), not as a paid commission but as an act of solidarity. I met the alliance through signing their petition to stop the excavation of the ancestral remains of enslaved Africans near the airport of Sint Eustatius and protest the lack of community involvement. As a white archaeologist I am not writing this article to tell the narrative of the enslaved Africans as I feel the descendant community3 has to be in control of that narrative. This article concerns the archaeological circumstances in which the protest takes place and tries to shed light on the way forward of dealing with ancestral remains. The ideas I put forward are not new in an international context; the same type of struggles over African burial grounds occur in other places such as St. Helena and Flatbush (NY) at the moment but they are not much discussed in Dutch archaeology. Suggestions are put forward for collaborative archaeology and guidelines for dealing with sensitive archaeology."

FULL TEXT

 

TO CITE:

marjolijn kok, 2022. A Future That Does Not Forget: Collaborative Archaeology in the
Colonial Context of Sint Eustatius (Dutch Caribbean). Rotterdam, Bureau Archeologie en
Toekomst, BAT-report 1.