Archaeology and community engagement in the Senegambia: from colonial mindsets to creative interactions

Local communities have been a central feature of archaeological projects in the Senegambia since the earliest research over a century ago, but their contribution has often been erased and their voice denied. This has fortunately started to change, although the weight of inherited colonial epistemologies and their workbench of concepts, modi operandi, languages, and dissemination strategies has limited the depth of the change. In this paper, we reflect on how the relationship between archaeologists and local communities has evolved in the Senegambia from the earliest archaeological projects to the present, and discuss the outcomes and shortcomings of two recent experiments in community engagement, aimed at making archaeological knowledge more accessible to local communities by rooting them in indigenous worldviews and practices of history-making and consuming.