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Kofi Argorsah (Archaeology Program, 1983), presently Chair of the Department of Black Studies at Portland State University, was awarded that university's premier teaching award in 2002 and has been an active member of the New York African burial Ground Project. This winter he will be conducting his seventh research mission on the archaeology of maroons (runaway slaves who establish free societies) in Suriname, this follows his research in Jamaica and Trinidad. He has rapidly established himself as the leading scholar on the archaeology of maroons and in 2001 edited Freedom in Black History and Culture which followed up his well-received 1994 Maroon Heritage : Archaeological, Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives. He has just completed a volume on the archaeology of the Volta basin in Ghana which will be published in 2003. Douglas Armstrong (Archaeology Program and 1983 Department of Anthropology) is now Professor of Antnropology and former Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Syracuse University and was president of the Society for Historical Archaeology in 2000-2001. Professor Armstrong has just published Creole Transformation to Freedom: Historical Archaeology of the East End Community, St.John, Virgin Islands (University of Florida Press, 2002) which breaks new ground on the archaeology of free African communities in a slave world. Paul Farnsworth (Archaeology Program, 1987), Professor of Anthropology at Louisiana State University, edited Island Lives: Historical Archaeologies of the Caribbean, University of Alabama Press, 2001. He and his wife Laurie Wilkie (Archaeology Program, 1994) have been actively excavating in the Bahamas for the past seven years. Laurie, now an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Berkeley, published Creating Freedom: Material Culture and African American Identity at Oakley Plantation, Louisiana, 1840-1950 (Louisiana State University, 2000). She has rapidly established her reputation as a leading scholar on the archaeology of African Americans and with George Shorter Jr. published Lucretia's Well: An Archaeological Glimpse of an African-American Midwife's Household in the Monograph series of the University of South Alababama's Center for Archaeological Studies in September 2001, the latest in a series of publications she has written on household archaeology, gender studies, ethno-medical archaeology and magic, and empowerment in African American archaeology. Possibly the most productive scholar has been Christopher DeCorse (Archaeology Program, 1989) who has worked largely in Ghana and Sierra Leone and is an Associate Professor in Anthropology at Syracuse University. At the end of 2001 he saw the publication of An Archaeology of Elmina: Africans and Europeans on the Gold Coast, 1640-1900 (Smithsonian Press) and edited West Africa during the Atlantic Slave Trade: Archaeological Perspectives (Leicester University Press). Within this latter volume are papers by Kenneth Kelly (Anthropology, 1995), now an Assistant Professor at the University of South Carolina, who has worked on the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century capital of the Hweda state in Benin and is now actively involved in archaeological research in Guadeloupe; and Philip de Barros (Anthropology, 1985), Director of the Archaeology Program at Palomar College, who has been studying iron working in Togo during the era of the Atlantic slave trade and who in 2000 co-edited Ancient African Metallurgy: the Socio-cultural Context (Altamira Press). These former UCLA archaeologists have helped establish a vibrant scholastic tradition on the archaeology of the African diaspora, a tradition which is soon set to close here with the end of regular courses in historical archaeology at UCLA .

Merrick Posnansky is Emeritus Professor in the Department of History. In January Professor Posnansky received the prestigious Harrington Medal of the Society for Historical Archaeology at their annual meeting in Rhode Island.


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