UC Riverside professor one of few Black archeologists searching for sunken slave ships and hidden history

When you find doll fragments at a former plantation in Florida where enslaved people lived and worked in the 1800s, it’s impossible to not wonder.

To whom did the doll belong? How did children live on a plantation? What was playtime like for the children of enslaved people?

That feeling of being able to hold a piece of the past before it is placed on a shelf or under a spotlight in a museum — that’s what got Ayana Omilade Flewellen hooked on archeology.

Making history tangible

An assistant professor of anthropology at UC Riverside, Flewellen belongs to a tiny group (less than 1%) within the archeology community — Black archeologists — and is one of a handful of Black female-born maritime archeologists who dive off the coast of St. Croix in the Caribbean and the Great Lakes in Michigan, scouring for wreckage of ships that carried enslaved people and fuselage of aircraft that once carried Tuskegee Airmen, the first African American military aviators in the U.S. Armed Forces.

At 31, Flewellen, co-founder of the international Society of Black Archeologists, is carving a niche as a researcher and archeologist who works on land and under water, exploring the ideas of race, gender, equity and social justice while tying the truths of the past to the present in each project.

Archeology, Flewellen says, is a way of showing history as opposed to telling it.

“Archeology really makes our history tangible in a way that it cannot be denied. It is important in our country right now in an environment that is thriving on misinformation,” said Flewellen, who identifies as non-binary (neither male nor female) and prefers the pronoun “they.”

Flewellen’s own history is rooted in Texas. They have been able to trace their family members back to the 1850s in Falls County in central Texas. But Flewellen was born in Atlanta, and grew up in different locations — Maryland, New Mexico and Florida. Their time in the Washington, D.C., area visiting museums and swimming off the beaches of Miami influenced their interest in history and, later, maritime archeology.

“Growing up with a single mom and limited, disposable income, we always looked for what we could do for free,” they said. “And that meant visiting a lot of museums and beaches.”

As an undergraduate at the University of Florida, Flewellen was an undeclared major for two years. They found their calling in 2010 during a field study at the Kingsley Plantation in Jacksonville, owned in 1814 by Zephaniah Kingsley and managed by his wife, Anna Madgigine Jai, a Senagalese woman who Kingsley had purchased as a slave. Flewellen was fascinated by how a Black woman had actively participated in plantation management, acquiring her own land and slaves after she was freed by Kingsley in 1811.

“That project hooked me to archeology,” they said.

Messages from the past

The work Flewellen does on land largely focuses on how African American women in the post-emancipation era dressed their bodies to negotiate the racism, sexism and classism that shaped their lives.

“I have found that dress is so important because when we think about the rise of White vigilante movements, they have targeted Black bodies and possessions,” Flewellen said. “How people see you as a Black person could have a huge impact on your life. We saw that in the Trayvon Martin case.”

Martin was a 17-year-old Black teen who was shot and killed by a neighborhood watch coordinator in a gated community in Sanford, Florida, on Feb. 26, 2012. He was wearing a hoodie at the time, an everyday garment that has found its way to the center of the national debate over racial profiling and social justice.

As an artist who fashions jewelry, Flewellen said they are always interested to see how enslaved people adorned their bodies.

“I’ve come across eyeglasses,” they said. “Buttons with wood, bone, metal or ceramic. Beautiful hand-carved stone beads. When you find these things, you think about the craftsmanship that went into it. When you look at objects made with bone, you think about what people were eating, what they had access to and what they created from the little they had.”

Flewellen also found doll fragments at the Kingsley Plantation and a marble at an archeological site in St. Croix — objects that touched them the most — they said.

“It allowed us to think about how children lived during these times,” Flewellen said. “It’s not something we talk about often. These objects and remnants of the past help us think more expansively about the human experience.”

History under water

Flewellen said maritime archeology, or looking for historical artifacts under water, was something that had never occurred to them — at least until they were a graduate student at the University of Texas, Austin.

“That field was pretty much dominated by White males and was never presented to me as a possibility,” Flewellen said. “The sheer cost of it was staggering to me. Learning to scuba dive can be very expensive.”

Connecting with Florida-based Diving with a Purpose, a volunteer underwater archeology program, changed Flewellen’s trajectory. They trained with the group at the YMCA in Dallas for free. At first, it was terrifying, Flewellen said.

“It took me a while to learn how to be buoyant under water and better control my breath,” they said. “But most importantly, I had to train my mind to know that I would be OK. I had to remind myself to breathe deeply, which makes it similar to a meditative practice as well.”

Flewellen’s first ocean diving experience was off the coast of St. Croix, where they co-administer an archeological project at the Estate Little Princess Plantation site, teaching modern archeological field method and theory to students and including members of the local community in the data collection process, empowering them to take ownership of their heritage.

At St. Croix, Flewellen collaborates with their research partner, Justin Dunnavant, an assistant professor of anthropology and archeology at UCLA. The project is hosted on property owned by The Nature Conservancy, a global environmental organization, and is a collaboration with the Smithsonian’s Slave Wrecks Project, local historic preservation groups, the University of the Virgin Islands, and several universities on the U.S. mainland. The Slave Wrecks Project searches for slave ships one voyage at a time, and looks at sites, histories, and legacies connected by those voyages.

Recently, as part of the project in the island of St. John, Flewellen’s team came upon a ship from the mid-18th century, which was not a vessel large enough to have carried enslaved Africans, but existed at a time when there was social transformation on the island.

“It helps us think about the maritime connection Black people had during that time period,” they said. “The docks themselves were also places where Black people congregated.”

Flewellen said the dives off the coast of St. Croix at the edge of the continental shelf have particularly been “amazing and beautiful.”

“You go from 150 feet to 3,000 feet underwater where it’s so dark,” they said. “It’s terrifying and exciting at once. The depth of the ocean is a perfect metaphor for the unknown. There is so much history in our waters that we can’t see.”

Moving and pushing boundaries

Flewellen’s ground-breaking work is helping transform the field of archeology, said Maria Franklin, professor of anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin from where Flewellen received their master’s and doctorate degrees.

“The work Ayana and others are doing is aimed at growing ourselves and training others as well as achieving more collaborations with communities and organizations so we can take archeology out of the ivory tower and out into the world,” Franklin said. “Whether it’s theorizing of the human social condition, doing field work or taking a collection and thinking about it, social justice is the mandate. It should be the goal. We need to see more folks in this field who look like us.”

Franklin says she sees her former student not just as a role model for Black students, but for students across all races and genders.

Dunnavant, Flewellen’s collaborator and research partner, said he views Flewellen as someone who never felt intimidated by challenges or barriers.

“It’s extremely important for (Flewellen) to be outspoken because it is important that other women see their work,” he said.

Dunnavant says his goal is to “become irrelevant” by training future archeologists.

“We have histories and heritages we don’t know about,” he said. “We may never learn about them in our lifetimes. So each of the projects we do have a training component.”

Their work, along with those of other Black archeologists plumbing the deep for slave ship wrecks and experiencing the power of finding their own history, will be featured in the National Geographic magazine to be published Monday, Feb. 7. Flewellen’s work has also been featured in the magazine’s podcast series “Into the Depths.”

Flewellen believes that the future of archeology depends on how well current practitioners can show connections between the past and present.

“A lot of people see it as a field for old White men,” they said. “In the future I see, it’s a practice that roots how humanity existed in the past and connects it to what we’re experiencing today. I like to see a future where projects are driven by community members and what people want to know about the past — our collective past.”