African Diaspora (Other Keyword)
76-100 (120 Records)
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...
Paths from the Plantation to Prosperity: An Archaeology of Barbadian Migration to Liberia (2025)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Social Landscapes of Settler Colonialism in the Caribbean", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The 1865 migration of over 300 Barbadians from the Caribbean to Liberia is a chapter of the African Diaspora representing complex pathways from the plantation to anticipated prosperity in Africa. The migrants, many coming from the rising and recently-emancipated middle class, were eager to leave behind a society that...
Personal Adornment and Identity Politics at Fort Mose (2024)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Fort Mose was the first legally sanctioned free black community in what later became the United States. Consequently, it was an experiment in freedom shaped by Spanish colonialism and African responses to it. Inhabitants of Fort Mose, including men, women, and children, lived their lives on a frontier and faced multiple challenges...
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...
Preserving History Underwater: Collaborative Archaeological Efforts and Insights into the African Diaspora at Fort Mose II Amid Environmental Challenges (2025)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Current Maritime Research in Saint Augustine, Florida", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Fort Mose in St. Augustine, Florida, was established in the 18th century as a sanctuary for escaped enslaved Africans, marking the first legally sanctioned free African settlement in what is now the United States. Initial investigations began in the 1970s and have since expanded to encompass collaborative terrestrial and...
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...
Reading Animal Remains: Identifying community specific foodways through faunal analysis. (2018)
This study explores the diet of the enslaved communities at James Madison’s Montpelier by analyzing two faunal assemblages from the property. The three enslaved communities provide a look at the social structures and power dynamics of enslaved communities through diet. The presence of different species, both wild and domestic, shows the access available to different communities. this paper explores those relationships by comparing three enslaved communities through five different assemblages at...
(Real)ities of Racism: Consumerism and the Long Emancipation at Fort Mose (1752-1763) (2025)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "The Intersection Between Natural and Cultural Heritage and the Pressing Threats to Both", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Fort Mose is the first legally-sanctioned free black community in what became the United States. This unique community, formed by self-emancipated Africans, provides a glimpse into the imagination, construction, and conflicted nature of early stages of freedom in Spanish St. Augustine....
Recreating forgotten sites of Jesuit enslavement at St. Inigoes (2025)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology of Chesapeake Landscapes in Transition", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Disturbed sites, disparate grids, and limited excavations are all-too-common in historical archaeology. But tricky archaeological projects nonetheless play a central role in the way that descendant communities reconnect with former plantation landscapes. This paper examines archaeological evidence from St. Inigoes,...
"Representativeness" and Sampling Dilemmas: A Comparison of Slave Cabins at the Bulow Plantation (1821-1836), Flagler County, Florida (2017)
For three summers University of Florida researchers have worked at the Bulow Plantation, a large sugar plantation in East Florida founded in 1821 and destroyed by fire in 1836 during the Second Seminole War, in an attempt to understand the parameters of enslavement at that site. In 2014 and 2015, the UF Archaeological Field School completely exposed the footprint of Cabin 1; relatively few artifacts were recovered, including an almost complete lack of buttons, beads, and other personal...
The Research Potential of DNA from Tobacco Pipes (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology and Analysis of the Belvoir Quarter" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Often, archaeologists are challenged by assigning cultural affiliations to their sites. Recently, four tobacco pipe stems were collected from a Maryland slave quarter and sent to a DNA lab. The analysis revealed the ancestry and sex of one of the tobacco pipe smokers, thereby providing archaeoloigsts a scientific link to a...
A Return to Fort Mose: Exploring a Free African Town on the Spanish Frontier (1752-1763) (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "African Diaspora in Florida" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, or Fort Mose, was a fortified settlement established in 1738 by the Spanish governor of Florida, and populated by recently self-emancipated Africans as a defensive element to the town of St. Augustine. The earliest free African town in what is now the United States, Mose was attacked and destroyed by the...
Roots in the Community: A Macrobotanical Analysis of Enslaved African-American Households at James Madison's Montpelier (2016)
In 2008, the archaeology department at James Madison’s Montpelier began a multi-year project that sought to understand the community dynamics between enslaved workers at the plantation in the early 19th century. This study excavated and analyzed four sites: South Yard, Stable Quarter, Field Quarter, and Tobacco Barn Quarter. Each of these sites represents a different community of enslaved workers, from those who worked in the mansion to field hands. This paper will compare the macrobotanical...
Roots, Resilience, and Resistance: Evaluating Evidence of African American Herbal Medicine (2022)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "New Avenues in the Study of Plant Remains from Historical Sites" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper will explore pursuits of well-being, resistance, and resilience by looking at ethnohistorical and macrobotanical evidence for African American herbal medicine from the American South. Ethnographic and oral history records highlight the historical importance of herbal medicine to African American...
Sacred or Mundane? Use of Comparative Zooarchaeology to Interpret Feature Significance at Kingsley Plantation, Jacksonville, Florida (2017)
Field schools offered by the University of Florida between 2006 and 2013 yielded exceptional potential to understand the lifeways of enslaved Africans who lived and labored at Kingsley Plantation, located on Fort George Island in Jacksonville, Florida (1814-1839). In 2013, excavations included a high-density deposit discovered in front of a slave cabin. It resembled an ordinary trash pit in some ways, but also contained some objects that have been associated with ritual or religious activity in...