African Diaspora (Other Keyword)
76-100 (111 Records)
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...
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...
"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...
Sankofa in Cyberspace: Developing New and Social Media at the African Burial Ground National Monument (2013)
The African Burial Ground National Monument is one of the smallest units of the National Park Service. Established in 2006, this still developing institution has developed an outsized presence in new and social media; in a short time it has become the most followed unit of the National Park Service on twitter, and has found ways to use podcasts and QR codes to expand the interpretive profile of the site. These efforts have fhelped unite a disparate series of interest groups,...
Scalar Analysis of Early 19th century Household Assemblages—Focus on Communities of the African Atlantic (2013)
Recent research on early 19th-century slave households at James Madison’s Montpelier in Virginia has focused on comparative household assemblage analysis on a number of levels including the local (between households within a single community), region (households within a market region), and the Atlantic (comparison of households between Jamaica and the Chesapeake). An important element in this comparative household analysis is scalar analysis. Scalar analysis is an analytical tool that allows...
A School for Williamsburg's Enslaved: The Bray School Archaeological Project (2013)
In 1760 the London-based philanthropy, the Associates of Dr. Bray, established a charity school for the religious education of free and enslaved African American children in Williamsburg, the eighteenth-century capitol of the Virginia colony. Known as the Bray School, the school was briefly housed in a rented dwelling adjacent to the campus of the College of William and Mary. The archaeological investigation of the suspected site of the Bray school in 2012 was a rare opportunity to materially...
Seeds, Weeds, and Feed: Macrobotanical Analysis of Enslaved African-American Plant Use and Foodways at a James Madison's Montpelier (2015)
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. In this paper, I discuss and compare the...
Seeking Out Slavery in Colonial Saint Domingue (Haiti) (2017)
Saint Domingue was the most important European colony of the Caribbean region, producing vast amounts of wealth through the labor of enslaved Africans and their descendants. It was also the setting of the only large scale slave revolt that succeeded in overturning the slavery system. In spite of this importance to Atlantic studies, African Diaspora studies, and historical archaeology, very little substantive research has been conducted on sites associated with the dwelling places of the enslaved...
Shifting Regimes: Progressive Southern Agriculture and the Enslaved Community (2017)
The late antebellum period witnessed the rise of an agricultural reform movement aimed at revitalizing the southern plantation system. Soil degradation from intensive cash crop cultivation contributed to the decreasing productivity of once prosperous farmland in many southern communities. Drawing on Enlightenment principles and scientific farming innovations such as crop rotation, fertilization, and soil chemistry, this progressive agricultural discourse attempted to maximize the efficiency of...
Signaling Theory, Network Creation, and Commodity Exchange in the Historic Caribbean (2016)
Signaling theory is becoming a common tool in the interpretation of slave-era households in the United States and Caribbean. As a heuristic tool, signaling theory’s effectiveness lies in its ability to provide insight into the differential consumption and disposal habits of past populations. This paper addresses not only consumer and disposal habits, but also commodity exchange and personal networks to place the material culture of enslaved and freed Africans from the Caribbean island of St....
Stagville within, beyond, and through the Digital Archaeological Archive for Comparative Slavery: Comparison -> Transition / Juxtaposition (2015)
The "Slave Cabin" at Stagville, excavated in 1979, was a component of the home farm quarter on one of the largest plantations in North Carolina. The small structure has several qualities that prompted its inclusion in the Digital Archaeological Archive for Comparative Slavery. As the first site from the state in the database, it will allow researchers to isolate and identify patterns associated with local conditions, including topography, settlement history, and regional economy. Stagville as...
Standing at the Crossroads: Toward an Intersectional Archaeology of the African Diaspora (2013)
In the 1970s a group of radical Black Feminists, known as the Combahee River Collective, met and put forth a concept they called the "simultaneity of oppression." In 1989, legal studies scholar, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term "intersectionality" to describe the interlocking matrix of oppression (meaning race, gender and class) experienced by women of African descent within the U.S. legal system. For African Diaspora archaeology, the framework of intersectionality has become a useful method...