 Whitney Battle Baptiste. I am at UMass Amherst and I'm in the Department of Anthropology. I'm a historical archaeologist and my area of specialty or my area of interest is the African diaspora, black feminist archaeology, and landscapes of slavery, post-slavery, and the materiality of race and racism. Why anthropology? I started out in history and I love the archive. I loved the unfolding of history. I loved the material aspect of learning about history and through the words of others. However, for me, history, there was so many stopgaps in history that I knew there was something more. I knew about anthropology but I did not know the hands-on experience that archaeology gave me. So right at the time when I started graduate school, I also decided to, well, I didn't decide to, I was given a fellowship for historical archaeology field school in the summer and it was amazing because I was at the same time writing my thesis going into the archives at Colonial Williamsburg, looking at wills and inventories at the same time that I was actually in the field digging up objects that were used, owned, discarded by people of African descent on a plantation. And it was at that moment that I realized that historical archaeology was a way for me to look beyond just the archive. It was a way for me to look beyond the secondary source and primary source but also to look at the tangible evidence of race, racism, and the African American and African diasporic past. Also what it did was it provided a means for me to enter into an identity as a black feminist. I began to concentrate on the experiences of women, of women of African descent and realized that pretty much I didn't have to look at artifacts and gender them. My theory was what was driving my interpretation but also as a black woman I was asking very different questions of the archaeological material than my predecessors or my mentors or my peers. And so in that sense I got into archaeology at a very vibrant time in which it was shifting from African American archaeology to African diaspora archaeology which was incorporating African diaspora theory, critical race theory, archaeological theory, but also what was material? How does material and consumption patterns? How does the availability of things? There's all of these ways in which stuff actually we are defined by the things that we have. The symbolism of objects, our relationship to things whether it be a phone, a computer, an iPad, which is a contemporary moment, but what about something you've passed down from generation to generation? What about something that a piece of jewelry or the ways in which you've taken one object and manipulated it to make it something that you really need at that moment? And so all of these also enhanced for me this idea that the African American past was so void of material. And as we know in the new National Museum of African American History and Culture we have a whole building that is filled with material. It's the material of our past. My concern is or my one of the things that I would love to do from this point forward is to really talk about why anthropology but not just anthropology, why archaeology is important to understanding race and racism, the African diaspora, black women, black men, black folks across the globe. And I think that we need to be a bigger part of the conversation as black archaeologists and that's why anthropology.