The First Black Archaeologist

Location

Saints Tekakwitha and Serra Hall, 200, Humanities Center

Free

Professor Lee discusses his book, The First Black Archaeologist: A Life of John Wesley Gilbert (Oxford, 2022), which investigates the pioneering work of John Wesley Gilbert, an African American classical scholar, teacher, community leader and missionary born into slavery in rural Georgia in the middle of the Civil War. The book follows Gilbert’s career from the segregated schools of Augusta, Georgia, to Brown University, to his hiring as the first black faculty member of Augusta’s Paine Institute, through his travels in Greece, Europe and the Belgian Congo. Gilbert was one of the first Americans of any race to conduct archaeological work in Greece. His career, largely unknown today, is compelling on its own merits as a story of African American achievement in the age of Jim Crow. Co- sponsored by the Classical Studies and Africana Studies programs and the Department of History.