Summary
Shot for the Society of Black Archaeologists’ student-spotlight series, this two-minute TikTok introduces Craig’s treasurer role inside SBA and the throughline running across his doctoral work at Northwestern: archaeology as a way to tell stories with objects. He opens on what drew him to the discipline — the fact that a single artifact can carry a story across centuries — and uses that frame to step through his recent trip to Nigeria.
What stood out there, he says, was generational depth: the first Nigerian archaeologists trained abroad in the twentieth century have now seeded three or four generations of Nigerian archaeologists working on their own material culture. He joined one of those projects with indigenous scholars researching their own histories, and treats the encounter as a model for Black and African diasporic archaeologists building parallel capacity in the U.S.
The spotlight then pivots to delivery: why museums, virtual reality, and augmented reality matter as the infrastructure for carrying archaeological data out to public and community audiences — methods he frames as “slightly outside of the scope of academia” but central to what the discipline can become when it treats communities as the primary audience for the work.