Honoring Ancestors in Sacred Space: The Archaeology of an Eighteenth-Century African-Bahamian Cemetery, by Grace Turner

摘要

Honoring Ancestors sheds new light on mortuary practices in the African diaspora by looking at the materiality of death. This noteworthy, well-written, concise book tells the story of a set of damaged burials located in the urban contextof Nassau, Bahamas, with attention to history, theory, and the archaeologicalimagination. Its primary intervention is that the deathways, represented in thelocation, organization, and assemblage of goods found with human remains,were informed by practices originating inWest and Central Africa and refractedthrough power dynamics of New World slavery.