Black Past Lives Matter: Digital Kormantin

FAIN: HAA-280830-21

University of Rochester (Rochester, NY 14627-0001)
Michael J. Jarvis (Project Director: January 2021 to present)

Development, prototyping, and testing of a virtual heritage tour of Kormantin (Abandze), Ghana, an early Atlantic Slave Trade port.

Black Past Lives Matter:Digital Kormantin uses 3 intertwined interactive virtual heritage tours of a Ghanaian slave trade fort to educate a global public about the Atlantic slave trade and its continuing legacy. Kormantin was England’s first permanent African slave trade base and an important but poorly known site in African American history. Our team of archaeologists, historians, computer scientists, digital media and videogame designers, and Ghanaian heritage scholars will use reconstructed and reality-captured 3D models to let users visit the site as it is today, midway through archaeological excavations in 2019, and as it was in 1790. In making free self-guided photorealistic explorations of a key World Heritage Site, our digital portal offers an example of how to expand accessibility to historic sites while showing how scholars use documents, archaeological evidence, and oral history to interpret a complex, painful past at a slave trade site that operated for more than 250 years.