African Diaspora (Other Keyword)
1-25 (111 Records)
In this paper I discuss how archaeological interpretations of nineteenth century free black communities can be strengthened when Africa as a discursive concept is included alongside our analyses of race. In the southern U.S. historical archaeologists have long been attuned to the tangible material presence of enslaved Africans and their descendants. I address the question of "Africa" in relation to nineteenth century free communities of color in Connecticut, arguing that the discursive nature of...
African Americans in a Dominican Cemetery: Social Boundaries of an Enclave Community (2013)
This paper presents preliminary findings from an aboveground study of a cemetery in Samaná, Dominican Republic. In 1824 approximately 200 African Americans left the United States for what was then Haiti, and established an enclave in a relatively isolated area of the island. Their Anglo surnames, Protestantism, and primary use of English have defined this community in relation to the neighboring Dominican and Haitian populations for over 150 years. Using spatial data from the town’s cemetery, I...
African Diaspora Archaeology "The Bocas Way" (2015)
This research is an investigation into the African Diaspora and an archaeological approach that is based on exploring the African Diaspora in a complex, multi-ethnic, multiracial situation, where I was able to draw on excavations, archival documents, and ethnography to infer the process of culture change and emergent identities. The research takes place within the western Caribbean island community of Bocas del Toro, Panama. In this presentation I will present my perspectives and approach to...
Afro-Brazilian Spaces of Worship: Late Nineteenth Century Archaeological Findings from Salvador, Bahia (2018)
This paper discusses the transformation of domestic living quarters into spaces of Afro-religious worship in Salvador, Brazil, during the late nineteenth century. This is accomplished through the presentation of historical sources that demonstrate the pervasiveness of this phenomenon, and especially, analysis of spatial and artifactual data unearthed during archaeological excavations in a house basement. The study uses historical, ethnohistorical and ethnographic analogies with present day...
Archaeological Investigation of the Brookgreen Plantation, South Carolina (2017)
Brookgreen Plantation was one of the largest and most productive rice plantations in the United States prior to the Civil War. Owner Joshua John Ward held more than 1,000 Africans in slavery on this and his other plantations. The remains of Brookgreen Plantation are now a part of Brookgreen Gardens, an outdoor museum established in 1931 by Anna Hyatt Huntington. Brookgreen Gardens is expanding its public interpretation of the historic plantations on its property, including the lives of enslaved...
Archaeology for Many More: A Necessarily Broad Approach to the Archaeology of Evergreen Plantation (2024)
This is an abstract from the "*SE New Orleans and Its Environs: Historical Archaeology and Environmental Precarity" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Evergreen Plantation Archaeological Survey (EPAS) focuses on understanding Black life during contexts of enslavement and post-Emancipation on Evergreen Plantation within Louisiana’s Cancer Alley. In Summer 2023, EPAS hosted its first interdisciplinary field school in which students not only learned...
An Archaeology of Homeplace at the Parting Ways, an African-American Settlement in Plymouth, Massachusetts (2016)
The paper will explore how the African-American residents of a late 18th- and 19th-century community called Parting Ways in Plymouth, Massachusetts constructed a homeplace in the years following their emancipation from slavery. Beyond their importance to household productivity, daily practices—for example, cooking, eating meals, taking tea, and household chores—constituted social interactions and exchanges between individuals that fostered a sense of security and strengthened the bonds of...
An Archaeology of Return?: African Diaspora Heritage in the Wake of the Slave Trade (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Activating Heritage: Encouraging Substantive Practices for a Just Future" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Analytical vectors of the African Diaspora have traditionally run east-to-west, charting the journeys of captive Africans from Sub-Saharan homelands to spaces and systems of racial violence in the Americas. Historical archaeology continues to shed light on the realities of such experiences across the spectrum of...
Archaeology of Urban Slavery In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology of Cities: Unearthing Complexity in Urban Landscapes", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Until recently the archaeology of the African diaspora in the Americas had focused its attention primarily on the plantations. Research conducted in urban areas, however, has shown the wealth of information extractable from city subsoils. As one of the most important ports of entry of Africans during...
Artefacts of transformation: the material culture of Black Loyalists in late eighteenth century Atlantic Canada. (2013)
In 1784, approximately 3,000 Black people who had joined the British during the American Revolutionary War were evacuated from New York to Nova Scotia, alongside several thousand other Loyalist refugees. This poster explores the transformative powers of three items of material culture in the creation and maintenance of a Black Loyalist identity in what is now Atlantic Canada: the book in which their names were recorded prior to their evacuation from New York; the uniform coat worn by one of the...
Aspirational Architecture and AK-47s: The Intersections of Nineteenth-Century Settlement Processes and the Post-Conflict Detritus of Violence in Liberia (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Reckoning with Violence" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Global awareness of Liberia’s recent past is largely limited to the long-term bloodshed that erupted with a 1980 coup and the ensuing civil conflict. What remains understudied is how recent episodes of violence are tethered to the decades following Liberia’s founding as a settler colony of the American Colonization Society in 1822. Our new...
Barrios de mulatos in the Izalcos Region of Colonial Guatemala (2018)
While much scholarship has focused on indigenous-Spanish relationships in the construction of colonial Mesoamerica, a substantial and growing part of the population of colonial settlements were people of African descent. This trend was equally true in the Izalcos region of colonial Guatemala, what is today western El Salvador. This region was a crucial center in the developing trans-colonial economy because of its early leading role in the production of cacao, the tree whose seed is the main...
Beads, Burials, and African Diaspora Archaeology: Documenting a Pattern of Black and White Bead Use within African-American Mortuary Contexts (2018)
African Diaspora Archaeology has its roots in Plantation Archaeology of the 1960s and 1970s. One artifact initially associated with enslaved contexts was the simple blue-glass bead (though other colors were recovered), recognized by some as signifying African-derived culture and beliefs, and by others as a controversial and potentially erroneous stereotype. Simultaneously emerging in the 1970s was the field of historical mortuary archaeology, where graves of African-Americans as well as...
Between Ideals and Reality: The Modernization of Southern Agriculture - 1830 to 1865 (2016)
An agricultural reform movement took rise in the late antebellum period aimed at modernizing the southern plantation system. Productivity of once prosperous farmland in many southern communities was gradually failing due to soil degradation from intensive cash crop cultivation. Drawing on Enlightenment principles and scientific farming innovations such as crop rotation, fertilization, and soil chemistry, this modern agricultural discourse attempted to control and maximize the efficiency of the...
Bioarchaeological Evidence of the African Diaspora in Renaissance Romania (2016)
Little documentary or archaeological information currently exists regarding the presence of people of African descent in Eastern Europe during the historical period. Known to have arrived in Europe with the Romans, free and enslaved Africans were common members of European society by the advent of the Renaissance, especially in the Moorish territories and the Ottoman Empire. In 1952, archaeologists recovered a set of partial remains of 30-35-year-old man during excavations of an Orthodox...
Blurred Boundaries: Internal and Illicit Plantation Economies (2015)
Craft production, hired time, personal cotton plots, theft, and diverse trade networks created a patchwork of economic opportunities for several hundred slaves on Witherspoon Island, a 19th century cotton plantation in the Pee Dee region of South Carolina. This paper explores the impact of household and community involvement in a myriad of economic practices that were at times sanctioned, expressly forbidden, or tacitly accepted by the plantation management. When the archaeological and...
The Body as Machine, the Body as Commodity, and the Body as a Temple: Treatments of Enslaved African Laborers on Buena Muerte Sugar Estates in Cañete, Peru (2017)
From its arrival in Lima in 1709 until the abolition of slavery in 1854, La Orden de la Buena Muerte was among the largest slaveholders in the sugar industry of Cañete, Peru. Moreover, as an order explicitly founded to oversee the physical and spiritual well-being of marginalized communities, the Buena Muerte also played a critical role in public health programs throughout the region. These activities were grounded in fundamentally different, and often opposing, perspectives towards the...
Bottles and Beads: Glass Objects at Fort Mose (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Classification systems that focus on primary function can obscure the cultural significance of objects for the people who used them. Glass bottles store liquids and glass beads are used for adornment. Yet these same objects sometimes had unique cultural meanings for Africans and African Americans who used them. In large assemblages bottles often get...
Breaking Bread and Breaking Down Boundaries: Reconsidering Roles and Scope of Archaeological Research in the Context of the African Diaspora (2024)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "A Tribute to the Legacy of Leland Ferguson: A Journey From Uncommon Ground to God's Fields", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Throughout his career, Leland Ferguson pushed against a priori notions of the ways in which archaeology should be conducted, whom it should be conducted by, and how it should be interpreted. He championed a multidisciplinary methodology that diversified informative data sources as well...
Building a Public Archaeology Effort Finding the Best Foundation Somewhere between Bedrock and Shifting Sands: Public Archaeology Efforts at Pandenarium (36ME253) (2018)
Small-scale and volunteer-driven public archaeology efforts undertaken at the site of Pandenarium (36ME253) aim to bring the results and practice of archaeology to many publics with recent outreach efforts including partnerships between state agency personnel and university archaeology programs, fieldwork opportunities for volunteers, interviews with local media, and presentations at local, regional, and national conferences. With changing methods and times, our definition of hybrid...
Carving out Niches for Rest and Resistance: Landscape Adaptation Writ Small at the Slave Cabins of Kingsley Plantation (2018)
Historians and archaeologists alike have noted the structural repression imposed by the plantation landscape. The organization of spaces and various structures on plantations allowed for optimal surveillance through the establishment of clearly delineated areas suggesting prescribed labor or activity. Personal spaces associated with enslaved Africans or African Americans were often easily visible from parts of the plantation that were typically occupied by white authority figures. Archaeological...
Ceramics, Foodways, and Identity in Bocas del Toro, Panama (2017)
The Island of Isla Colon in the western Caribbean archipelago of Bocas del Toro, Panama has long been a place of trade and exchange. In the period shortly before Old World contact, different native groups visited the region producing an array of material evidence. Regionally diverse ceramics found on the island demonstrate a plethora of styles and traditions from both northern and southern regions during this ancient period. The practice of ceramic diversity on Isla Colon continued well into the...
A Chained Melody: Queering Ceramic Industries in 19th century South Carolina (2016)
During the antebellum period, ceramic industries began to sprout up across South Carolina’s agricultural landscape. In the Edgefield district, located near the South Carolina-Georgia border, a number of family-owned kilns contracted enslaved laborers from nearby plantations to mass-produce stoneware for sale throughout the Southeast. Innovative alkaline glaze technologies became the foundation for experimental ceramic traditions and styles. A long-held local fascination with these ceramic...
Colonial Archaeology at a Regional Scale: Linking British and Spanish Settlements in Caribbean Coastal Honduras (2024)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Gateways to Future Historical Archaeology in Mexico and Central America", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. No settlement is an island. This paper presents results from ongoing research on the historical archaeology of Central America, showing how understanding one site on Honduras's Caribbean coast, the fortress and town of Omoa, requires investigation of settlements in other areas. Our excavations of the...
Combatting Gullah Erasure in the Ground and Out of it: Archaeology’s Place in Hilton Head Island (2022)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "First Steps on a Long Corridor: The Gullah Geechee and the Formation of a Southern African American Landscape" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In 2019 a total of 2,684,328 vacationers came to Hilton Head Island, SC. The 70sq mile island rose to supremacy in the vacation industry in the 1970’s where it’s remained for more than fifty years. But before it was #15 on the “Worlds Best Vacation Islands” list...