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More than 3 million African men, women and children are thought to have crossed the Atlantic on British slave ships between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The British carried more Africans into slavery than any other people excepting the Portuguese, and between 1660 and 1807, when the British trade was abolished, every second slave entering the ‘New World’ arrived on a British ship.1 Since the 1960s, the history of Britain’s role in the slave trade has been explored in depth by economic and social historians and (increasingly) by archaeologists too. Yet despite all that has been written, huge gaps remain in our understanding. This is true even for ‘Middle Passage’,2 the initial sea voyage that took captive Africans to the Caribbean and the Americas.

I am an historical archaeologist, with a special interest in the archaeology of slavery from the Roman era to the nineteenth century. In 2001, I was awarded a Caird Senior Research Fellowship at the National Maritime Museum, to initiate a project entitled Material Culture of the Middle Passage. This ongoing project seeks answers to two very basic questions about the material culture of the Middle Passage: what artefacts would be found on a ship making such a journey? And can examples of these be found in British museums?

I recently moved to the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and am now writing a book that takes its name from my Greenwich project. The present contribution sets out the aims and scope of my Middle Passage research, and describes the artefact categories identified in the course of my work on collections in London, Liverpool and Bristol. At the same time, this paper makes an appeal for information about similar materials in collections outside the major port cities of the slave trade. Any information on relevant material can be sent to the postal/email address at the end of this paper, and will be gratefully received.