MyKayla Williamson

MyKayla Williamson is an archaeologist and PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. Her research explores the African Diaspora through the lens of archaeology, material culture, and heritage, with particular attention to how Black life, labor, and belief shaped and resisted the logics of empire. She centers community-engaged and interdisciplinary methods to investigate both rooted and diasporic Black histories across the Atlantic World.

MyKayla Williamson’s work examines the Black existence through the material and cultural expressions of the African Diaspora. Her current research investigates how Black identity is shaped by hybridity, inheritance, and labor across geographies. With an emphasis on familial archives, she explores how children of patrilineal cultures—particularly those raised in diaspora or with disrupted fatherlines—negotiate belonging through language, memory, and kinship roles. Emerging projects trace shifts in artisanal knowledge, such as the reorientation of traditional crafts toward tourism economies, revealing how cultural practices are preserved, commodified, or transformed. Across these inquiries, she focuses on how Black life endures and adapts through vernacular archives, inherited knowledge, and everyday acts of making and meaning.