African Diaspora (Other Keyword)
51-75 (102 Records)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This study explores the relationships between food choice and resistance at a 19th century plantation in the United States. In 2017, archaeologists excavated two features at the Belle Grove enslaved quarters in Middletown, Virginia— a root cellar and borrow pit that was filled in when a log cabin burned down. By using comparative...
Making Food, Making Middens, and Making Communities: Exploring the Effects of Cooking and Trash Disposal on a Virginia Plantation (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Enslavement" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Recent excavations at Belle Grove Plantation (Frederick County, Virginia) have identified what appears to be an outdoor cooking pit associated with one of the property’s early to mid-19th century slave quarters. While we do not know how long those enslaved at Belle Grove used this feature, eventually numerous large faunal elements (presumably the remains...
Making the Invisible Visible: Interpreting the Plantation Landscape at James Madison’s Montpelier (2015)
Montpelier was the lifelong home of James Madison, father of the Constitution, architect of the Bill of Rights, liberty-lover, and lifelong slave-owner. Just as importantly, Montpelier was home to a community of as many as six generations of enslaved Africans and African Americans who built the plantation, who generated the Madison family’s wealth, and who enabled James Madison to pursue a life of learning and public service. As archaeological excavations and documentary research allow us to...
Making Time for Tea(wares): Slow Archaeology, Enslaved Life, and the Poetics of Consumption (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Plantation Archaeology as Slow Archaeology" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The study of enslaved people’s consumption practices often relies on ‘fast science,’ reducing these acts to a reflection of socioeconomic structures or a medium for agency and self-expression. What often gets lost is the effects these actions had. My paper builds on Édouard Glissant’s discussions of the ontological and ethical...
Mapping God's Little Acre: Digital Documentation of Newport's Colonial African Burial Ground (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The remarkable site of God’s Little Acre (GLA), the historic African and African American section of Newport’s Common Burial Ground, comprises the largest surviving corpus of gravemarkers from a colonial era African cemetery anywhere in the United States. In 2019, members of the Rhode Island Historic Cemetery Advisory Commission...
Mapping the Archaeology of Slavery in the Hudson River Valley (2016)
Recent archaeological research is producing an ever expanding literature on the material conditions of slavery in the north, particularly as it existed in New York City and Long Island. As a result, archaeologists and historians now recognize that the built environment of slavery assumed many forms in the northeast, including plantations. Yet, a rigorous archaeological scholarship in the upper Hudson valley is lagging. Archaeologists at the New York State Museum began a project in 2015 entitled...
Marley Brown, the Golden Horseshoe, and African Diaspora Archaeology (2015)
Marley Brown is little recognized for the tremendous role he played in mentoring those of us who, with his support and encouragement, pursued research on the African diaspora. It wasn’t his style to seek the spotlight, and he was far more concerned with social justice and the positive growth of the discipline which he considered to be inseparable issues. Brown not only opened doors for many of us, he served as a critical sounding board for our fledgling ideas and was generous with his advice. In...
Maroons And The Underground Railroad In The Great Dismal Swamp During The Antebellum (2015)
The Great Dismal Swamp Landscape Study has focused on the lives of Maroons living in the Great Dismal Swamp during the 17th and 18th centuries. In addition, the Great Dismal Swamp was arguably both a destination and channel for the Underground Railroad. Cultural transformations that took place at the start of the 19th century and the role of the Great Dismal Swamp in the UGRR demonstrate concepts of agency in different relationalities, including personhood, materiality and fields of action. ...
Materializing the Momentary: Community Engagement Through Ethnographic Practice (2015)
Community engagement is a growing aspect of archaeological practice; not only are archaeologists realizing that these kinds of projects are increasingly important to the movement of decolonization in regards to the histories of under-represented communities, but also that these relationships produce valuable knowledge about sites and their life histories. This paper specifically examines the unique ethnographic moment that arises when descendants and archaeologists come together in the practice...
Mose In the Middle: Terrestrial and Maritime Methods Meet In St. Augustine (2022)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Fort Mose Above and Below: Terrestrial and Underwater Excavations at the Earliest Free Afro-Diasporic Settlement in the United States" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The site of Fort Mose in St. Augustine, Florida, faces considerable environmental threat. Remains of the fort are located on a small hammock north of the colonial city. Once connected to the mainland by agricultural fields, the fort was...
The Mozambican enslaved in the destination of the Paquete São José: Maranhão, Brazil (1770-1835) (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "The Uncovering of the World of the São José Paquete d’África, a Portuguese Slave Ship", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This presentation is the Brazilian counterpart of trying to understand a specific route of the slave trade between Mozambique and the Brazilian Amazon, a route taken by the São José Paquete d’África. From this experience we can understand part of the diasporic process from Africa and...
Native Songs: Music and Mount Vernon’s Enslaved Community (2020)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In the twilight of George Washington’s life in 1799, a community of 317 enslaved Africans and African-Americans worked the five contiguous farms that comprised the 8000 acre Mount Vernon plantation enterprise. By far the largest of three principal groups of music-makers, the enslaved community was joined by the Washington household and hired white workers and their families, each...
Negotiating And Creating Tension And Change Through Religion, Mortuary Practices, and Burial Sites Within African-Descent And Moravian Communities In The Caribbean (2018)
Historical archaeologies of the African diaspora in the Caribbean have recently expanded on analyses of relationships between religion, mortuary practices, burial sites, and varied environmental, social, economic, and cultural contexts. In addition, studies currently investigate the politics of death and burial, including who controlled mortuary spaces, at what times, by which means, and for what purposes. Finally, research collaborations analyze community formation and activity through the lens...
One Artifact, Multiple Interpretations: Postcolonial Archaeology and the Analysis of Chinese Coins (2015)
This paper examines how a focus on "culturally bounded" groups restricts historical archaeology’s exploration of oppressive social practices such as slavery, racism, and inequality. Competing interpretations of a single class of material culture – in this case, Chinese coins – illuminates how bias enters archaeological interpretations in subtle ways. Chinese coins, also known as wen have been recovered from historic sites on nearly every continent. The author focuses on the interpretation of...
One if by Land, Two if by Sea: Community-based Archaeology at Fort Mose (2022)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Fort Mose Above and Below: Terrestrial and Underwater Excavations at the Earliest Free Afro-Diasporic Settlement in the United States" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In an era when community-based participatory research is becoming the norm, it is important to recognize the pioneers of this approach. Kathleen Deagan and her students began a research project at Fort Mose in the 1980s that resulted in...
Padlocks As Multivalent Objects In The African Diaspora (2022)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The recovery of a padlock from a domestic site seems ordinary, offering mundane interpretations to a prosaic piece of material culture. However, a lock found adjacent a slave cabin door is potentially more evocative, suggesting a negotiated social relationship, conditional privacy, and limited freedoms within enslavement. Beyond...
Plants, People, And Pottery: Looking At The Personal Agriculture Of The Enslaved In South Carolina. (2016)
The wealth of the Southern states was built upon the free labor of enslaved Africans toiling in the agricultural fields of their masters’ staple crops. In the Lowcountry of South Carolina the enslaved worked within the task system, which allotted them "free time" to then work to supplement the meager rations they were given. Research into the diets and spirituality of enslaved Africans can lend insight into the foods they purchased, grew, and foraged – personal agriculture in the face of...
Poaching Pots and Making Places: Slavery and Ceramic Consumption in the Shenandoah Valley (2018)
The Shenandoah Valley, with its German / Scots-Irish heritage and its focus on small-scale mixed farming, formed a distinctive region within early 19th century Virginia. Here, unique ways of interacting with global markets emerged as residents profited off the sale of agricultural products while simultaneously choosing to purchase locally made earthenwares over imported wares, practices which reproduced local ethnic identities. However, many of the region’s White residents owed Black Virginians,...
Post-Emancipation African American Life in the Upper South and South Louisiana: insights from a comparison of material culture from the Hermitage, Tennessee, and Alma and Riverlake Plantations, Louisiana (2018)
The DAACS (Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery) database also includes data relevant to post-Emancipation, including Jim Crow era life of African Americans. DAACS facilitates comparative research, expanding the scale of archaeological inquiry. Through the use of DAACS, post-Emancipation assemblages from the Hermitage site in Tennessee were compared with those from Alma and Riverlake sugar plantation sites in southern Louisiana. Evidence of shared economic strategies related to...
Project Archaeology in Florida: Teaching and Understanding Slavery at Kingsley Plantation (2015)
The Florida Public Archaeology Network was established in 2005 and within a year hosted its first Project Archaeology: Intrigue of the Past workshop. As a proud sponsor of Project Archaeology in Florida, regional center staff partnered with the National Park Service and University of Florida to publish the first Investigating Shelter investigation in the southeast. It was also the first in the Investigating Shelter series to feature a National Park site. Investigating a Tabby Slave Cabin teacher...
Public History at Appomattox: A Broadened Perspective (2018)
The farm owned by Dr. Samuel Coleman represents a typical homestead within the Virginia community of Appomattox. The site is also an integral part to the conclusion of the Civil War. In conjunction with the National Park Service and the University of South Carolina archaeological research will be performed to develop interpretations of each component of the site. A primary effort of this work is to learn about the life of Hannah Reynolds, an enslaved person at this home. Traditional excavations...
Public Interpretation of Faneuil Hall/Town Dock Artifacts: Exploring Boston’s Role in Slavery (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Urban Archaeology: Down by the Water" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In 2000, Massachusetts voters passed the Community Preservation Act (CPA) enabling municipalities to raise local property taxes to fund historic preservation, land conservation and affordable housing. The City of Boston (COB) Archaeology Program, which has been chronically underfunded for the last thirty-six years, has no operating budget...
Public vs. Private in the Domestic Spaces of the Enslaved: Yards and their Uses at Kingsley Plantation, Jacksonville, Florida, 1814-1860 (2016)
Kingsley Plantation, a Second Spanish Period site located on Fort George Island in Jacksonville, Florida, has seen various excavations over the course of the past six decades. In addition to an intensive focus on the interiors of slave cabins, the investigation of which allows interpretation of private and personal spaces, yards around the cabins have been examined in order to better understand those areas that operate as both personal and public. Yards provided the settings for activities tied...
Race and the water: the materiality of swimming, sewers and segregation in African America (2017)
Few dimensions of the color line were monitored as closely as access to American rivers, beaches, and swimming pools, which became strictly segregated in the early 20th century. This paper examines the heritage of color line inequalities in Indianapolis, Indiana's waters, where beaches were segregated, African Americans were restricted to a single city pool, and waterways in African-American neighborhoods still accommodate sewer overflows. Despite that history, a new wave of urbanites is now...
(Re)Framing Colonial Histories and the African Diaspora through a Restorative Archaeology. (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Africa’s Discovery of the World from Archaeological Perspectives: Revisiting Moments of First Contact, Colonialism, and Global Transformation", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The arrival of the First Africans in English North America in 1619 marked a pivotal moment for the Virginia colony, for their arrival and labor secured the permanency and expansion of the colony itself. Previous Anglocentric narratives...