Ceramic Investment by the Enslaved Community at The Hermitage, TN

Summary

For the first time, archaeological data from excavations at The Hermitage, Andrew Jackson’s nineteenth-century cotton plantation near Nashville, Tennessee, are being made available to researchers through the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS). These assemblages are associated primarily with enslaved laborers who lived in three Antebellum quartering areas on the plantation. Building on previous research about slaves’ acquisition of non-provisioned goods, this poster interrogates one subset of these data, imported ceramics, to assess the distribution of goods across the spatially-divided enslaved community. First, we establish a plantation-wide chronology using correspondence analysis to date deposits from the mansion backyard, outlying field quarters, and the First Hermitage, the earliest settled area of the plantation. We then review how specialized forms and decorated vessels varied across time and space between the three domestic areas, and whether this variation reflects relative investment in market goods.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage