Slave Wrecks Project
The Slave Wrecks Project is an international network of researchers and institutions hosted by the Museum. The Slave Wrecks Project uses maritime archaeology, historical research and the study of sunken slave ships to take a distinct approach to the study of the transatlantic slave trade.
Slave Wrecks Project In the News
Special Feature
From No Return: The Journey of the Slave Ship São José
Explore the different ways communities continue to commemorate and research the history and memory of the São José. The scope of this story is far more than a single shipwreck site. It is a journey across geography and time that extends around the globe and exists on a crossroad between individuals and communities, cultures and nations, descendants and ancestors.
Our Mission
The Slave Wrecks Project (SWP) searches for slave ships one voyage at a time, and looks at sites, histories, and legacies connected by those voyages. This mission to humanize the history of the global slave trade increases all people’s capacity to understand a trade that shaped the world in which we live. By recovering the experiences and highlighting the humanity of those who were enslaved aboard the ships that plied the most horrific and extensive trade in people in world history, SWP seeks to bring the immensity of that history to a human scale, voyage by voyage. Through SWP’s efforts, previously submerged archeological remains and long-neglected histories are recovered, restored, remembered, protected and shared.
Mozambican archaeologist Celso Simbine takes notes on a dive in 2018 in St. Croix with divers from the National Park Service Submerged Resources Center.
Our Global Partners
Along with the museum, SWP’s global partners represent the international leadership of the project and engage in collaborative work across regions that span and expand the Atlantic world. Current global partners for the SWP network include The George Washington University, Iziko Museums of South Africa, U.S. National Park Service and Diving With a Purpose.
The SWP network also spans a growing list of national, regional, and at-large partnerships with institutions, researchers, and community groups in South Africa, Mozambique, Senegal, Cuba, Brazil, Saint Croix (U.S. Virgin Islands) and other sites in the United States.
Ken Stewart, founder of Diving With a Purpose (DWP) with instructors and students in Biscayne National Park, Florida.
What We Do
- Conduct groundbreaking research rooted in specific regions, but with a global reach that incorporates the disciplines of maritime and historical archaeology, history, museology and anthropology.
- Build a community of global scholars conducting local and regional research that spans the world created by the African slave trade.
- Create interpretive programming with its partnerships that manifests dialogues about the complex, enduring legacies of the slave trade.
- Foster an educational agenda that cultivates opportunities from the classroom to heritage tourism to empower local communities while developing international exchange and collaboration.
- Advance education and professional training in partner communities to encourage diversity within the fields of history, archaeology and anthropology, with a focus on the lasting legacies of the African slave trade.
- Work with descendant communities to connect local histories to the global slave trade and includes local communities in research.
- Promotes knowledge, fosters reconciliation and advances social justice.
Jaco Boshoff, Iziko Museums of South Africa, on the site of the São José wreck, Cape Town, South Africa.
Why Our Work Matters
SWP catalyzes a new field of research – maritime archeology – in the scholarship of slavery and the slave trade. The project establishes a new model for international collaboration among museums and research institutions, and it links research to professional training, institutional capacity building, heritage protection and heritage tourism.
Perhaps the single greatest symbol of the transatlantic slave trade is the ships that carried captive Africans across the Atlantic never to return. Until SWP recovered the wreck of the slave ship São José in 2014, there had never been archaeological documentation of a vessel that foundered and was lost while carrying a cargo of enslaved persons. Locating, documenting and preserving this cultural heritage has the potential to reshape understandings of the past, making unique and unprecedented contributions to the study of the global slave trade. In addition, publicly displaying and interpreting this history through a variety of platforms provide the opportunity for a worldwide public to experience and grapple with authentic pieces of the past that played such a foundational role in shaping world history.
Diving With a Purpose lead instructor Jay Haigler trains members of the community monitoring program on the Ilha de Moçambique in 2018.
While we can find artifacts and archival records, the human connection to the history helps us engage with this American story in a compelling way. MARY N. ELLIOTT Curator of American Slavery at the NMAAHC and leader of the community engagement activities for the Slave Wrecks Project