Documenting Subfloor Pits in a Slave Cabin at the Bulow Plantation (1821-1836), Flagler County, Florida

Author(s): James Davidson

Year: 2016

Summary

In 2014 and 2015, the University of Florida Historical Archaeological Field School conducted excavations at the Bulow Plantation, a large sugar plantation in East Florida which was founded in 1821 and destroyed in a fire in 1836, during the Second Seminole War.  Our focus was a single domestic slave cabin of frame construction with a coquina stone chimney/fireplace. Excavations revealed a previously unknown architectural detail at the site in the form of a stone lined sub-floor pit feature or root cellar.  Subfloor pits associated with African and African-American housing and dating from the 17th through the 19th centuries have been well-documented archaeologically in Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina and the Upland South. This stone-lined root cellar complex, containing two discrete sub-floor pits, represents the only archaeologically known example of this feature form identified in the state of Florida.

Cite this Record

Documenting Subfloor Pits in a Slave Cabin at the Bulow Plantation (1821-1836), Flagler County, Florida. James Davidson. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, Washington, D.C. 2016 ( tDAR id: 434694)

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Keywords

Temporal Keywords
1821-1836

Spatial Coverage

min long: -129.199; min lat: 24.495 ; max long: -66.973; max lat: 49.359 ;

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 320