ABSTRACT
In March 2014 Peter Schmidt and Innocent Pikirayi invited to join a workshop as interlocutors with archaeologists and heritage experts engaged in participatory projects in sub-Saharan Africa. The pressure of the presumption that people, as practitioners not working in an African context could possibly come in and provide concrete, pragmatic suggestions to those working in other contexts/places/histories about what it means to conduct community-based archaeology and/or heritage practice was daunting and uncomfortable. Revisiting the idea of archaeological "communities", within historical archaeology there is definitely a community doing African Diaspora archaeology, with a subset that focuses seriously on community engagement. Within them, there is an emerging community addressing racism/white privilege and building alliances with anti-racism advocates outside archaeology. Put another way, the real point of collaborative work about the historical archaeology of the African Diaspora is to begin dismantling racism and white privilege in the present.
