African Diaspora (Other Keyword)
51-75 (111 Records)
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...
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...
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...