Aspirational architecture and AK‐47s: Fragmented violence in Liberia from settlement to the contemporary

Abstract

AbstractGlobal awareness of Liberia's recent past is largely limited to the long‐term bloodshed that erupted with a 1980 coup and the civil conflict that followed soon thereafter (1989–2003). What remains understudied is how recent episodes of violence are tethered to the decades following Liberia's founding as a settler colony of the American Colonization Society in 1822. Our collaborative Back‐to‐Africa Heritage and Archaeology (BAHA) project, the first to archaeologically investigate the Back‐to‐Africa movement, explores processes of nineteenth‐century settlement at sites established by West Indians and Black Americans. In this article, we focus on the Barbadian‐settled township of Crozierville to highlight the complex ways in which materials associated with the colonizing project are linked to vestiges of recent violence that persist on the postwar landscape. With a specific focus on settler‐community architecture, in addition to the material vestiges of civil conflict, this article highlights the need to understand recent episodes of violence through Liberia's unique history of Back‐to‐Africa settlement and the Black/African Diaspora.