Summary
Artefacts, sites, and landscapes of Liberian pasts defy simplistic historical interpretation. Liberia’s settlement and nationhood are often reduced either to lamentations over the first African Republic’s geopolitical failures or to romanticized narratives of Black settlement, aristocracy, and sovereignty, even though the material record gives partial truth to both readings.
This chapter focuses on Liberia’s ruins and monuments as material signatures of Atlantic colonial pasts, afterlives of slavery, and visions of Black sovereignty that continue to unfold in the present. Through the Back-to-Africa Heritage and Archaeology Research Project, it foregrounds a growing archaeology of Liberia that helps interpret settlement and undoing while supporting the country’s emerging cultural heritage sector.