Exploring the Berbice Slave Rebellion: Sample NSF-GRFP Proposal
Background
This project was the final assignment for my Archaeological Methods class I took in the winter of my junior year, which was to write an abridged application of the National Science Foundation's Graduate Research Fellowship program, specifically focused on the project proposal. For this, we were allowed to examine any archaeological site that we wanted as long as it had a strong, focused methods section. As someone who hopes to attend graduate school for bioarchaeology, this was an opportunity to solidify an idea of a project that I might want to actually work on in the future. For this project, I decided to find an archaeological project in Guyana, the country where my mother is from. However, one of the biggest challenges in determining a project of interest is that Guyanese archaeology is a scarce field, and the archaeology of British colonialism, which is an era of interest for me, is even more sparse.
When speaking to my grandmother, I expanded my search outwards to any monuments that she might be able to think of that I might be able to use as a jumping-off point. She told me about the story of Coffy, whose statue stands in Georgetown, the figurehead of a slave rebellion in Guyana. The Berbice Slave Rebellion, which Coffy is said to have helped lead, is moreso a piece of oral history than something physically memorialized today. In this project proposal, I aim to find archaeological traces of the brave men and women who fought in this rebellion, and bring an even greater amount of attention to this event that falls within the Age of Revolutions but is rarely ever mentioned as part of it.
Reflection
I could write in detail about the experience of writing this proposal and presenting it to my class as the primary mode of science communication for this artifact, but through that experience I found that there is a much more meaningful, casual mode of communication that hearkens back to what I mentioned in my ethnographic piece: communicating with family and community about the archaeological and biological science that I want to do that they are also connected to through our shared origins. In writing this piece, I cited many members of the Guyanese community who want to see their histories made visible, and who are hoping to see this work done. Intrinsic to science communication and the archaeological schools of thought that I subscribe to is the importance of community outreach and engagement, and in projects like these, that element is vital.
If I were to actually complete this project, communicating the work that I'm doing with other Guyanese people in the country and within the diaspora would be a major pillar of the project, which is emphasized in the "Broader Impacts" section of the paper. One of the reasons that the piece is so broad is because this project should incorporate the wants of other stakeholders in the process, and not just a single Guyanese-American interested in the work. Being able to clearly communicate what I hope to achieve and what is possible for me to do to other people who are interested is something that the Notation has prepared me well for, and will become important in shaping this project to be more specific and to reflect my commitment to community-based archaeological practice. I also believe that the presentation that accompanies this paper would be a great help in achieving that goal, and in it, I incorporate many of the core principles of design and communication that I have learned from my Notation coursework.