African Diaspora (Other Keyword)
51-75 (120 Records)
In previous research on an African American enclave in Samaná, Dominican Republic baptism and marriage records have provided a wealth of information; this data has been looked at for marriage patterns within and beyond the confines of the community, naming practices, and even spatial information regarding where individuals lived. This paper, however, will begin a discussion on a component of these documents which has, to date, gone unexplored: legitimacy rates and the baptism of illegitimate...
In Search of Freedom: Investigating 19th Century African American Settlement Development in Southern Indiana (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Silenced Lifeways:The Archaeology of Free African-American Communities in the Indiana and Illinois Borderlands" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. During the early 19th century, free African Americans began moving from North Carolina to Orange County, Indiana, developing a small farming community in Southeast Township. This community, known today as the Lick Creek African American Settlement, thrived for several...
In the Most Unlikely of Places: Marley R. Brown III, the College of William & Mary, and Foundational Moments in African Diaspora Archaeology (2015)
Through the nineties, there were significant moments in the development of African Diaspora archaeology as a field and as a practice. We were moving our focus from the Main House to the daily lives of captive people and interpreting plantation landscapes differently. We witnessed major archaeological discoveries, such as the African Burial Ground in New York City and the Levi Jordan Plantation in Texas, and it was the beginning of lively debates about the practice of community engagement. These...
In the Smokehouse and the Quarter: exploring communities of consumption through faunal remains at the Montpelier plantation (2017)
During the 2015 field season the Montpelier Archaeology Department excavated two smokehouses located in area known as the South Yard, home to enslaved domestic laborers. The excavations unearthed a large faunal assemblage spread across the yard between these structures. This paper serves as the initial findings of my Masters internship through the University of Maryland, which will look at the diet across the three enslaved communities present at Montpelier by comparing...
Interpreting Slavery from Urban Spaces: African Diaspora Archaeology and the Christiansted National Historic Site (2016)
The Christiansted National Historic Site in the US Virgin Islands has served as a landmark site documenting the history of African Diaspora and Danish occupation in St. Croix from 1733-1917. Three archaeological projects surrounding the Danish West India and Guinea Company Warehouse have uncovered a wealth of cultural resources that have lasting implications for the largely Afro-Caribbean descendent Crucian community and for future interpretations of urban slavery in Caribbean contexts....
An Intersectional Analysis of Personal Adornment at the African Meeting House in Boston (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "An Archaeology Of Freedom: Exploring 19th-Century Black Communities And Households In New England." , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Built in 1806, the African Meeting House in Boston was a prominent social institution for the free Black community residing on Beacon Hill. Beyond functioning as a church, the African Meeting House was used as a school, housing for community members, as well as a meeting space...
Jumping the Legal Color Line: Negotiating Racial Geographies in the 19th Century (2015)
The legal status and civil rights of Free Persons of Color in the U.S. were constantly being negotiated throughout the 19th century from state to state, and varied from relative amounts of freedom and legal rights to strict "Black Laws" barely removed from slavery. This paper explores the ways in which Free Black Pioneers utilized the changing state and local boundaries (and with them, quickly changing legal status for Free People of Color) to their advantage, capitalizing on their racial...
Known as a Welcoming Place: The Construction of Community and Memory in a Black Summer Community, Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts, 1870 – 1950 (2024)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology of Marginalization and Resilience in the Northeast", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper reflects on and shares insights from the Oak Bluffs Historic Highlands Archaeology (OBHHA) project, a community-based historic landscape study that maps the construction and growth of an early-20th Black vacationing community in the Highlands area of Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts. The project focuses on the...
Leland Ferguson’s Uncommon Ground, In Small things Forgotten, And Cultural Resistance (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. One of Leland Ferguson’s goals when writing Uncommon Ground was to present his archaeological findings on colonoware and of the South Carolina Lowcountry to a general audience in a similar vein as that of James Deetz’s In Small things Forgotten. Unlike Deetz, his study centered on the...
Liberia’s Plymouth Rock?: Archaeologies of Freedom-Making, Settler Colonialism, and National Heritage on Providence Island (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Global Archaeologies of the Long Emancipation", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The 2022 bicentennial of the arrival of Black Americans to West African shores was a moment of reflection for many Liberians. In the wake of civil war, many questioned the celebratory tone of the occasion and challenged settler heritage narratives. At the same time, Providence Island featured prominently in official programming,...
Life Experiences in an African Diaspora Community: Archaeology of Omoa, 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. Drawing on field excavations conducted in 2008 and 2009, and extensive research in documentary archives, we present an overview of the lives of people who were residents of the Spanish colonial town of Omoa, which developed adjacent to the Fortaleza de Omoa in the last half of the eighteenth century. Omoa...
Looking Through Dirty Dishes: The Preliminary Results of a Ceramic Analysis at Pandenarium (36ME253) (2018)
In recent years, African Diaspora archaeology has become one of the most impactful means by which archaeologists supplement our current understanding of the past. Not only does this subfield have the potential to benefit descendant and local communities, but it also enables professionals to fill in the blank gaps left by the systematic disenfranchisement and intentional illiteracy of an entire group of people. One site with the potential to enhance our understanding of the African Diaspora is...
A Macrobotanical Analysis of a Root Cellar at the Belle Grove Enslaved Quarters (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. 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...
Monsters, Men, and the Afro-Andean Baroque: Slavery and the Sacristy Lintels of San Francisco Xavier de la Nasca (Peru) (2025)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In May 2024, the Haciendas of Nasca Archaeological Project undertook a comprehensive registration of architectural and artistic features at the ruinous Jesuit hacienda chapel of San Francisco Xavier de la Nasca in Peru’s Ingenio Valley. Completed in 1745 in the Late Andean Baroque style, the hacienda chapel was intended to...
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...