10 Atlantic African, American, and European Backgrounds to Contact, Commerce, and Enslavementby conceptualizations like W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Double Con-
sciousness,” Paul Guilroy’s “Black Atlantic,” or Ira Berlin’s
“Atlantic Creoles.”
See also: Amalgamation; Atlantic Creoles; Double Con-
sciousness; Salt-Water NegroesMichelle E. Anderson
and Walter C. RuckerBibliography
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Herskovits, Melville J. Th e Myth of the Negro Past. New York:
Harper, 1941.
Mintz, Sidney, and Richard Price. Th e Birth of African-American
Culture: An Anthropological Perspective. Boston: Beacon
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of Anthropology 30 (2001):227–60.African Burial Ground,
New York City
Th e New York African Burial Ground—the oldest and larg-
est cemetery for enslaved Africans in the United States—
was unearthed in 1989 as construction workers prepared to
install a 34-story federal offi ce building in lower Manhattan.
Following the discovery that the building site was situated
above an 18th-century “Negroes Burying Ground,” a crew
of archaeologists was employed to conduct an archaeologi-
cal excavation. In 1991, the construction of the federal of-
fi ce building ensued alongside an extensive archaeological
dig that uncovered the skeletons of more than 400 enslaved
Africans buried at the cemetery during the early to late 18thseveral examples of African infl uences in the sacred and
the secular ethos of African Americans. Herskovits not
only established the foundations for the Africanist School,
he also challenged several prevailing myths about Afri-
can American life in the United States. By demonstrating
tangible cultural links between Africa and its diasporic
communities—that is, communities of Africans dispersed
outside of Africa—Herskovits took full aim at several mis-
conceptions, including the notion that Africans came from
extremely diverse cultures and were randomly distributed
in the Americas in a concerted attempt to undermine their
ability to fashion a collective identity. Th e Africanist School,
therefore, actively searches for evidence of “Africanisms” in
areas such as religion, language, family, and socialization
among other areas.
Th e third school of thought, serving as an interpre-
tive middle ground between the Annihilationists and the
Africanists, is the Creolization School. Th is approach is
epitomized by the work of anthropologists Sidney Mintz
and Richard Price. In 1976 they published Th e Birth of
African-American Culture with the intent to critique and
revise Herskovits’s earlier fi ndings. Th ey claimed that Af-
ricans transported across the Atlantic to become slaves in
the Americas developed and created a culture that cannot
be characterized simply as African. According to their re-
search, the nature of the slave trade and enslavement in the
Americas made the continuity of African culture nearly
impossible. Mintz and Price contend that, while African
culture was an important element of African American cul-
ture, it was by no means central and not independent of
European infl uences or new cultural developments in the
Americas arising out of the slave experience. In this regard,
acculturation (or creolization) was something that began in
the holds of slave ships and continued through the experi-
ences of enslaved Africans on Western Hemisphere plan-
tations. African American culture, therefore, is a product
of cultural fusion and was as connected or disconnected to
Africa as it was to Europe and the unique social and cul-
tural milieus of the Americas.
Acculturation will continue to exist as a concept and
lived experience for centuries to come. As globalization
broadens economic and political ideas, it also increases
contact among a diverse group of people. Th e end result
of such sustained contact is the creation of cultural poly-
glots, which, themselves, are the result of acculturation. For
African Americans the process may be encapsulated best