Professor Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann is Ghana’s first female archaeologist. She is an archaeologist, anthropologist, curator, heritage practitioner, and direct descendant. she is the founder and director of the Christiansborg Archaeological Heritage Project (CAHP) in Osu, Accra, Ghana – the first organization in Ghana dedicated to community engagement, development, community-centered placemaking and transformative change through archaeology, heritage, art, and education.
She holds a PhD in Archaeology and Anthropology from Stanford University (2013), a MA in Archaeology and Anthropology from Stanford University (2013), a MA in Museum Anthropology from Columbia University (2005), a BA in Anthropology from Columbia University (2003). She is also the only archaeologist to graduate from Stanford University Business School’s Innovation and Social Enterprise Program (2011).
Her research interests include West African Islam, the transatlantic slave trade and slavery, colonialism, critical heritage studies, descendant epistemologies, public humanities, and decoloniality. Her work foregrounds descendant and community-engaged approaches to heritage, with a particular focus on the history and afterlives of enslavement, memory and materiality.
Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann directs the long-running archaeological excavations at Christiansborg Castle in Accra, Ghana, and oversees The Center, a community space dedicated to archaeology, heritage, art, and education. Through excavations, exhibitions, public programming, libraries, workshops, and collaborative initiatives, her work bridges archaeology, material culture, digital heritage, and community engagement.
She is the editor of Timbuktu Unbound: Heritage, Islam and the Manuscript Traditions of West Africa (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) and co-editor of Architectures of Slavery: Ruins and Reconstructions (University of Virginia Press, 2025). She has also served as a guest editor for peer-reviewed journals and is the author of numerous scholarly essays, articles, book chapters, and reviews in heritage, archaeology, anthropology and museum studies. She serves on several editorial boards.
Her public essays have been translated into other languages and republished throughout Africa and the African diaspora. Her work has been featured in national and international media, documentaries, exhibitions, and public humanities initiatives focused on archaeology, enslavement, and heritage in Africa and the African diaspora. She has curated and co-curated several exhibitions and collaborates extensively with creatives, descendants, and local communities.
Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann has received multiple interdisciplinary fellowships, grants and prizes from institutions in the United States, Europe and Africa. She has taught in the United States, Africa and United Arab Emirates and is a sought after speaker who has lectured at universities, colleges, museums, conferences and international organizations across Africa, Latin America, Asia, the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe.
She is currently on sabbatical and working on multiple projects.