The project was initially founded in 2000 with funds from the Archaeology Department of Monticello, the historical home and plantation of Thomas Jefferson and a modern UNESCO World Heritage Site.
[1][2] The project's goals include cultivating collaboration between scholars of multiple disciplines and the sharing and open access to American slavery-related archaeological data.
[3] In addition to organizing and conducting physical excavations of slavery-related archaeological sites throughout the Chesapeake region, the Carolinas, and the Caribbean, the project maintains a free, online, publicly available SQL database of detailed archaeological recordings from sites related to the slavery of Africans in North America and the Caribbean.
[3] In 2008, with funding from the US National Endowment for the Humanities and the UK Joint Information Systems Committee, the DAACS began a project to provide three-dimensional laser scans of Afro-Caribbean artifact sherds as part of its online dataset.
3D image files are created using a NextEngine 3D Scanner HD at a resolution of 40,000 points/in², using 3D digital scanning techniques established by the University of California, San Diego Levantine and Cyber-Archaeology Laboratory.