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

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 petition2 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 descendent 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.