Bio

Dr. Weik received his undergraduate degree from Wake Forest University and his graduate degrees from the University of Florida (1995, 2002). Weik chose a career in archaeology in order to explore African diasporan cultural origins, freedom seeking initiatives, struggles with inequalities, and social identities. Outside of academia, Weik’s career has involved brief interludes in GIS applications, Cultural Resource Management, and private consultation (museums, nonprofits, and government agencies).

Teaching 

Dr. Weik’s pedagogical goals are to teach students how to be critical thinkers, resourceful knowledge seekers, globally-informed citizens, good writers, and life-long learners. Courses that Weik has taught include the following:

Course Title (#)                                                                                                    Level                                                     

African American Cultures (ANTH 231)                                                   Undergraduate

Modernity, Archaeology, and the Recent Past (ANTH223)                                                               

Primates, People, & Prehistory (ANTH101)

Principles of Archaeology (ANTH319)          

Violence & Peace: Anthropological Perspectives (ANTH216)

Archaeological Lab Methods  (ANTH550)                                               Mixed grad/undergraduate

Culture & Identity in the African Diaspora (ANTH580)

Seminar in Historical Archaeology (ANTH745)                                      Graduate

Ethnohistory (ANTH773)                                                                                  

Research Interests

Archaeology, African Diaspora, Antislavery Resistance, Social Identity, Ethnogenesis, Self-liberation, Race, Native Americans

Research 

Dr. Weik is a historical archaeologist who takes an anthropological, diaspora approach to Africans in the Americas. His research methods employ multiple lines of evidence such as documents, oral history, geophysics, GIS data, and material culture. Weik’s earliest research involved Africans who escaped from slavery in Florida as well as Mexico, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic. Ethnogenesis and the linkages between indigenous people and Africans were particularly salient in his early works. His fieldwork in South Carolina explored plantation and urban slavery. As a consultant for the Audubon Society (Mississippi), Weik explored the transition from slavery to tenant farming, and helped restore a place for African American voices and heritage in the nature programs at Strawberry Plains plantation. While at Strawberry Plains, Dr. Weik discovered the potential for beginning a new phase of research on African and Native American interactions. His current project is examining indigenous Chickasaw slaveholding, community building, African agency, frontier entrepreneurship, and intercultural engagements. The latest dimension to this project involves the parallels between African diasporic displacement and “Indian Removal.” Weik is exploring this topic in an edited volume which he was invited to assemble (University of Florida Press), entitled The Archaeology of Removal in North America. This volume will explore how archaeologists working on various contexts—industrial complexes, colonial villages, rural towns, modern island fringes, reservations, impoverished homesteads, natural disaster sites, and prisoner camps—are uncovering the causes, consequences, and processes of forced human and material relocation.

Representative Publications 

Books: 

2012   The Archaeology of Antislavery Resistance. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

Edited Volume

2019  The Archaeology of Removal in North America. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

Articles: 

2019  Engendering Labor, African Enslavement, and Human-Horse Relations in Chickasaw   Territory.  Journal Of African Diaspora Archaeology & Heritage 8 (1-2): 110-130.

2014  The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis. Invited Submission to the Annual Review of Anthropology.  43:291–305.                   

2012  Race and the Struggle for a Cosmopolitan Archaeology: Ongoing Controversies over the Representation and the Exhibition of Osceola. Historical Archaeology 46(1):1-30.

2009  A First Look at the Archaeology of African Americans at Strawberry Plains. Mississippi Archaeology. 41(1): 3-32.

2009    The Role of  Ethnogenesis and Organization in the Development of African-Native American Settlements: An African Seminole Model.  International Journal of Historical Archaeology  13: 206-238.  

2008  Presencing African Americans at the Seibels House.  South Carolina Antiquities 40: 108-129. 

2004  Archaeology of the African Diaspora in Latin America.  Historical Archaeology  38(1): 32-49. 

1997  The Archaeology of Maroon Societies in the Americas: Resistance, Cultural Continuity and Transformation in the African Diaspora. Historical Archaeology  31(2): 81-92.

Book Chapters:

2007    Allies, Enemies and Kin in the African-Seminole Communities of  Florida: Archaeology at Pilaklikaha, in Archaeology of Atlantic Africa and the Africa Diaspora, edited by Toyin Falola & Akin Ogundiran. Indiana University Press.

2005    Not Just Black and White, in Indigenous Peoples and Archaeology, edited by Claire Smith and Martin Wobst, pp. 281-297. Routledge. Coauthored book chapter with Ruth Mathis.

Recent Accomplishments 

• Wenner Gren Foundation research grant
• U. of SC Provost Social Sciences research grant