Heritage Voices · The Archaeology Podcast Network

Revisiting With Ayana Omilade Flewellen - Ep 102

·56 min·3 clips

The Dallas Freedmen’s Cemetery yielded one legible gold-plated name pin: Lorena.

1. Heritage Voices episode 102 centers on Dr. Ayanna Omilade Llewellyn’s revisiting of her research, teaching, and heritage work after nearly four years. 2. Host Jessica Uquinto interviews Ayanna Omilade Llewellyn, a Black feminist archaeologist, artist-scholar, storyteller, assistant professor in Stanford’s Department of Anthropology, and co-founder of the Society of Archaeologists. 3. The episode asks what changed between November 2021 and late September 2025, and how new evidence altered a planned book on Black women’s sartorial choice after enslavement. 4. Ayanna describes applying for Stanford in October 2021, giving a November job talk, and leaving the University of California, Riverside after work on Black Studies and Black archiving there. 5. She talks about the Bay Area as professionally nourishing because of Stanford, Berkeley, Santa Cruz, and Oakland, while also naming the region’s housing costs as a major constraint. 6. Her book project began as a dissertation-based study of the Levi Jordan plantation collection, which had been gathered in the 1990s and early 2000s. 7. A new technical report in March 2022 suggested that the Levi Jordan assemblage may not have come from enslaved quarters alone, which changed the interpretive ground of the project. 8. Ayanna says that shift pushed her to reject a single-site book and instead build a three-site story using the Hermitage, the Sarah and Ransom Williams Farmstead, and the Dallas Freedmen’s Cemetery. 9. She names Jillian Galley, Maria Franklin, James Davidson, Lori Wilkie, and Bill White as mentors and colleagues she contacted when the project had to change. 10. The Hermitage chapter follows Nancy, who absconded in 1863 with clothing and bedding, and whose record links dress, seamstress work, and flight from enslavement. 11. The Sarah and Ransom Williams chapter turns to shoes and shoe components, as well as the family’s nine children and the landscape they moved across while building a Black landowning life. 12. Ayanna places that farmstead story alongside oral histories, school travel, horse work, and racially segregated spaces like Rose and Antioch Colony. 13. The Dallas Freedmen’s Cemetery chapter shifts to burial and identity, where road paving and later highway work erased burial markers and led to the disinterment of 1,157 individuals. 14. She says the only legible name she found was Lorena, from a gold-plated wire name pin likely buried in 1901. 15. Ayanna treats that name pin as a rare way to approach intimacy, naming, and self-presentation after emancipation. 16. She also says the book’s concluding chapter looks at contemporary artists who reinterpret dress and adornment in the past. 17. The interview style is reflective and practical, with Jessica prompting long answers and Ayanna moving between personal career history and site-specific archaeological detail. 18. The tone stays conversational and candid, especially when Ayanna describes grief, uncertainty, and the time it took to turn the dissertation into a book. 19. People interested in Black feminist archaeology, historical archaeology, dress, and heritage preservation will likely want this episode. 20. Listeners wanting a brief overview without research-process detail may skip it.

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