Christopher DeCorse, Distinguished Professor and chair of anthropology, has been selected as a Joukowsky lecturer for 2024-25 for the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA).

As the honoree, DeCorse has been invited to give his lecture, “Africans, Europeans, and Finding Castle Cormantine: Archaeology and Cultural Entanglement on the 17th Century Gold Coast,” in four locations–the AIA’s societies in Columbus and Oberlin, Ohio; Gainesville, Florida; and Valparaiso, Indiana.

The lecture will cover his team’s 2023 discovery in coastal Ghana of trade materials related to England’s first outpost in Africa, established in 1632 and one of the earliest that sent enslaved Africans to the Americas. He made the discovery with researchers from Syracuse University, Maxwell anthropology students and alumni, and collaborators from the University of Rochester, the University of Ghana and the University of Virginia. The excavation was supported by a $21,000 CUSE grant and a $125,000 award from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Founded in 1879, the AIA is a nonprofit organization that supports archaeologists, their research and its dissemination, and has over 200,000 members and 100 local societies across the U.S., Canada and Europe. Joukowsky lecturers are supported by the AIA’s national lecture program and named after Martha Sharp Joukowsky, a past AIA president.

DeCorse is a senior research associate for the for the Maxwell African Scholars Union, housed in the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs. His areas of expertise include general anthropology, African archaeology and history, African diaspora studies, and colonialism and change. He has authored many publications and textbooks, including “An Archaeology of Elmina: Africans and Europeans on the Gold Coast, 1400-1900” (Percheron Press, 2001) and more recently, “Power, Political Economy, and Historical Landscapes of the Modern World” (SUNY Press 2019).

By Michael Kelly