About

Dr. Justin Dunnavant holds the Joan Silsbee Chair of African Cultural Archaeology at UCLA. His first book, 'Colonialism, Ecology and Slavery', under contract with Princeton University Press, investigates the relationship between ecology and enslavement in the former Danish West Indies. In addition to his archaeological research, Justin is co-founder of the Society of Black Archaeologists and an AAUS Scientific SCUBA Diver. In 2021, he was named a National Geographic Emerging Explorer and inducted into The Explorers Club as one of 'Fifty People Changing the World that You Need to Know About.' In 2022, he was awarded the Stafford Ellison Wright Black Alumni Scholar-in-Residence at Occidental College. His research has been featured on Netflix's 'Explained,' Hulu's 'Your Attention Please' and in print in 'American Archaeology, Science Magazine', and 'National Geographic Magazine'. He currently serves on the Board of Trustees for the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation and the Aquatic Futu

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• History
• Archaeology
• Law
• Social Science
• Art history
• Demography
• Engineering
• Genealogy
• Library science

Selected publications

• Archaeology of the Plantation Complex in the Caribbean

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2026-04-22

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Escaped slaves on St. Croix hid their settlements so well, they still haven’t been found – archaeologists using new mapping technology are on the hunt

  2025-08-27

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Modeling Marronage: GIS Heuristics of Refuge Affordances in Colonial St. Croix

  Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory · 2024-11-20 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract On the Caribbean island of St. Croix, archival documents reference settlements of runaway enslaved Africans in the mountainous range known as Maroon Ridge. These settlements provide an important record of Afro-Atlantic resistance to enslavement. However, as both intentionally secluded and ephemeral places of refuge, these maroon settlements are difficult to locate in the archaeological record. Geospatial modeling provides one avenue for understanding African geographies of resistance. Building on prior geospatial modeling efforts, this paper uses a GIS-based multicriteria suitability analysis to characterize the shifting affordances of marronage on Danish colonial St. Croix across the second half of the eighteenth century. By considering how the island landscape “looked” to those seeking refuge, we trace how possibilities for refuge were distributed through space and over time. In this paper, we develop affordance heuristics to model refuge using digitized historic maps and publicly available LiDAR data. The resulting model suggests shifting maroon refugia sites over time and demonstrates how geospatial approaches, paired with historical archives, can model historic affordances across time.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Counter-Mapping Maroon Cartographies

  ACME · 2023-10-30 · 8 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Formal spatial modeling and analytical approaches to maroon settlement, fugitivity, and warfare in the colonial-era Caribbean have tended to mine historical cartographic sources instrumentally to analyze the distributions and simulate processes driving marronage in St. Croix (Dunnavant 2021b; Ejstrud 2008; Norton and Espenshade, 2007). Through close-in analysis, we compare two Danish maps of St. Croix produced in 1750 and 1799 in relation to modern cartographic sources, to explore how cartographic forms and cartesian conventions (attempt to) elide blind spots in the colonial gaze. By modeling possible subject-oriented maroon movement on georeferenced colonial maps and contemporary LiDAR, we demonstrate how GIS can recover anti-colonial agency. Additionally, the practice of georeferencing itself is a critical site of analysis, revealing distortions suggestive of social and environmental conditions that limited colonial cartographers’ ability to map certain wilderness and contested landscapes that lay outside of their control.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Chasing Impact Through Community - with Justin Dunnavant, Ph.D.

  New Florida Journal of Anthropology · 2022-05-13

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Craft an African American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act

  Nature · 2021 · 61 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Computer Science
  • Genealogy
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• In the Wake of Maritime Marronage

  Slavery and Abolition · 2021-07-03 · 8 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article delves into the experiences of maritime maroons to critically fabulate the life of Mattadore, an eighteenth-century enslaved fisherman who fled captivity in St. Croix. Drawing from Christina Sharpe’s framework of analyzing Black life ‘in the wake’, this article envisions Black sociality from the wake of maritime marronage. Through the process of flight, maritime maroons produced alternative geographies on the sea where they refused the status of slavery and became prominent socio-political actors in the colonial era. Such a conceptualization centres the ocean as a critical space of Black geographic and historical worldmaking. Often overlooked as a site of metamorphosis, it was on the sea where Africans were first transformed from free into enslaved and again transfigured from enslaved into free, never fully complete in either process. Finally, this article challenges the categorizations of ‘petit’ and ‘grand’ marronage as ineffective at explaining the full range of complexities of maritime maroon experiences and motivations.

  PublisherDOI

• “The Future of Archaeology Is Antiracist”: Archaeology in the Time of Black Lives Matter

  American Antiquity · 2021 · 134 citations

  • Sociology
  • Archaeology
  • History

  This forum builds on the discussion stimulated during an online salon in which the authors participated on June 25, 2020, entitled “Archaeology in the Time of Black Lives Matter,” and which was cosponsored by the Society of Black Archaeologists (SBA), the North American Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG), and the Columbia Center for Archaeology. The online salon reflected on the social unrest that gripped the United States in the spring of 2020, gauged the history and conditions leading up to it, and considered its rippling throughout the disciplines of archaeology and heritage preservation. Within the forum, the authors go beyond reporting the generative conversation that took place in June by presenting a road map for an antiracist archaeology in which antiblackness is dismantled.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Creating Community and Engaging Community: The Foundations of the Estate Little Princess Archaeology Project in St. Croix, United States Virgin Islands

  International Journal of Historical Archaeology · 2021 · 38 citations

  • Sociology
  • Archaeology
  • Political Science

  This article discusses how Co-Principal Investigators that designed and executed the Estate Little Princess Archaeology Project (ELPAP) came together as a community, to demonstrate how such a formation within the discipline, with all its ups and downs, facilitates the skills needed to conduct community archaeology. By using the ELPAP as a case study, this article provides a multiscale examination of the ELPAP, expanding the discourse on community archaeology to include community building practices among archaeologists, between organizations, and with communities impacted by archaeological work.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Have Confidence in the Sea: Maritime Maroons and Fugitive Geographies

  Antipode · 2020-12-14 · 65 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Since the birth of the Transatlantic slave trade, enslaved Africans have exploited their geographic circumstances to obtain liberation, effectively transforming them into maroons. However, geographies of marronage have disproportionately investigated terrestrial landscapes to understand how self‐liberated Africans made life in the Atlantic world. Turning our attention to the sea, I use geospatial analyses to map ocean currents and explore routes of passage for maritime maroons from the island of St. Croix (Ay Ay). Mapping this oceanic cartography of Black fugitivity provides renewed insight into the ways in which maroons used oceanic literacy to actualise their quest for freedom and their experiences in their new homes.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Alexandra Jones

  University of Worcester

  9 shared

• Ayana Omilade Flewellen

  Stanford University

  6 shared

• Tsione Wolde-Michael

  Smithsonian Institution

  6 shared

• Alicia Odewale

  University of Tulsa

  5 shared

• William A. White

  University of California, Berkeley

  2 shared

• Delande Justinvil

  American University

  2 shared

• Lauren Kohut

  Winthrop University

  2 shared

• Steven A. Wernke

  Vanderbilt University

  2 shared

Labs

• Justin Dunnavant LabPI

Education

• Ph.D., Anthropology

  University of Florida

  2017

• M.A., Anthropology

  University of Florida

  2013

• B.A., History/Anthropology

  Howard University

  2009

Awards & honors

• National Geographic Emerging Explorer
• Fifty People Changing the World that You Need to Know About
• Stafford Ellison Wright Black Alumni Scholar-in-Residence