Slavery (Other Keyword)
151-175 (354 Records)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. There are many challenges that educators face when teaching slavery in middle and high school classrooms. Archaeology-centered activities offer unique ways to talk about and incorporate histories often left out of the historical record in a manner that can engage students in important and meaningful conversations on the subject. The authors will share their experiences and...
Hidden People in the Past: Honoring the Scholarship of Debra Martin (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Debra L. Martin" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Because archaeologists use ancient material culture to reconstruct the lives of people in the past, they tend to find those people with the most abundant and well-preserved property. Only the past few generations of archaeologists have looked beyond large settlements and monumental buildings to investigate common people. But...
Historic Archeology at Star and Bourbon Plantations (1983)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.
The Historic House Yard Landscapes of St. Kitts’ Southeast Peninsula Plantations (2016)
Like most of the Leeward Islands, St. Kitts' historic economy was powered by sugar cultivation. Enslaved Africans and ultimately freedmen were the labor source in the sugar fields and from the late seventeenth century onward enslaved Africans outnumbered Europeans 15 to 1. By the early nineteenth century there were over 100 known slave villages across the island. Using data from three investigated plantation sites from St. Kitts’ southeast peninsula, the spatial arrangement of the enslaved...
The historiography of the archaeology of slavery in the French West Indies (2013)
This paper poses the questions "what is an archaeology of slavery? why has it only developed in French archaeology in the last twenty years?" In the 1990s a number of organizations began to take an interest in the archaeology of slavery, and worked towards a commemoration of the institution. In the French West Indies, the DRAC and Inrap began to undertake CRM work on cemeteries and other sites associated with slavery. At the same time, activist organizations in the French West Indies...
History of Kansas: from the First Exploration of the Mississippi Valley, To Its Admission into the Union, Embracing a Concise Sketch of Louisiana; American Slavery, and Its Onward March; the Conflict of Free and Slave Labor in the Settlemen (1868)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.
The House-Yard Revisited: Domestic Landscapes of Enslaved People in Plantation Jamaica (2016)
Across the sugar-producing islands of the Caribbean, the "slave village" has remained both a significant object and context for archaeological study of plantation slavery. Recent landscape perspectives have fostered new methods for seeing the material lives of enslaved people at the household and community scales. In recent years, however, little attention has been given the household infrastructure that extended beyond the house itself and articulated quarters into a village complex. The swept...
Household Archaeology and Slavery in Tidewater Virginia (2020)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper focuses on the results of fieldwork at an urban plantation in colonial Williamsburg that once belonged to John Coke, a tradesman and tavern owner. In order to address questions concerning the enslaved household economy and labor, I compared the artifacts from Coke’s quarter to those of two other tidewater plantation sites. An approach which positions these households...
Household to community, community to region: A multiscalar approach to identity and interaction at two fugitive slave villages in 19th-century Kenya (2015)
In 19th-century coastal Kenya, runaway slaves were known as watoro. This paper uses an expanding analytical framework to investigate watoro identity and interaction at three scales. First, I use artifact concentrations and domestic spatial dynamics to illustrate the daily lifeways and material preferences of individual households in two watoro villages, Koromio and Makoroboi. I then compare multiple households within each watoro community in order to investigate how these households interacted...
Housing Occupation and Constructing Race in Plantation Jamaica: A Comparative Archaeology between two Slave Villages at Good Hope Estate. (2016)
The “slave village” occupies an important place in Caribbean archaeology, though one in which the internal variation and dynamics of a village have yet to be thoroughly addressed. This has resulted in an essentialized picture of the "enslaved community” as a single entity. However, recent excavations at Good Hope estate, an 18th/19th-century sugar plantation in Jamaica, have demonstrated greater internal variation of experience, revealing that the plantation's enslaved community was divided...
How Can Archaeological Spatial Structure Advance Our Understanding of the Social Dynamics of Slavery?: an Example from Monticello. (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Enslavement" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. We explore how patterns in the distribution of artifacts across sites can inform us about variation in household organization and resource access among people enslaved at Monticello. We use DAACS protocols to we measure variation among artifacts that is sensitive to temporal availability, acquisition costs, and artifact size at a domestic site occupied...
How Can Behavioral Ecology and the Analysis of Archaeological Spatial Structure Help Identify Inequality among Enslaved Households at Monticello? (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Practical Approaches to Identifying Evolutionary Processes in the Archaeological Record" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For decades archaeologists have used optimization models to puzzle out how artifacts served the fitness interests of their makers and users. This paper offers a simple optimization model to clarify how selective pressures (e.g. household size and occupation span) shape the maintenance of space on...
How can evolutionary models and archaeological evidence help us understand change in the household economies of slave villages on Nevis and Kitts? (2016)
Early-modern slave village sites in the eastern Caribbean are littered with both locally-made "Afro-Caribbean" and imported European ceramics. Archaeologists have focused on the former as an expression of identity, while ignoring copious variation in time and space in both classes of ceramics and the causal mechanisms that might be responsible for it. This paper embeds evolutionary models of costly signaling and markets in a larger multi-level selection framework to offer a tentative explanation...
"I Likewise Give To Indiana & Elizabeth The Following Slaves...": The Founding of Sweet Briar College and its Racially Charged History (2016)
In 1858, a transplanted Vermonter, Elijah Fletcher, died in Amherst, Virginia, leaving his antebellum plantation and over 140 enslaved individuals to three of his children. His oldest daughter, Indiana Fletcher Williams, combined this inheritance with some of her own wealth and founded Sweet Briar College in 1900 through a directive in her will. In 2001, I began researching the descendants of the enslaved community, studying an on-campus slave cemetery, and designing brochures and exhibits to...
"I WAS born June 15, 1789, in Charles County, Maryland…" Archaeological Investigations at the Josiah Henson Birthplace Site (2018)
In his 1849 autobiography, Josiah Henson, a former slave, preacher, and conductor on the Underground Railroad, recounted a single, brutal event that occurred at La Grange, the plantation on which he was born. Henson’s account related little about everyday life for the enslaved families at La Grange. In 2016, archaeologists from St. Mary’s College of Maryland undertook a Phase I survey at La Grange. A quarter complex and several individual quarters were discovered during the survey. These...
Ideas on an Interpretive Framework for Understanding Sites of Convict Leasing (2024)
This is an abstract from the "*SE The State of Theory in Southeastern Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Convict leasing was an exploitative, capitalist-driven system that successfully replaced race-based chattel slavery with class-based rented forced labor in the American South. The system sits at the intersections of race, masculinity, labor, economics, and modernity. It reveals the ways that widely condemned historical practices, such...
Identifying a Luso-African Slaver in Cape Town: An Overview of the Archaeological and Archival Evidence for the São Josè Paquete d’Afrique (2016)
In December of 1794 the São Josè Paquete d’Afrique foundered off of Capetown while transporting nearly five hundred slaves from Mozambique who were destined for northeastern Brazil, resulting in the death of over two hundred souls. This presentation reports on how ongoing archaeological work on site combined with archival work in Africa, Europe, and South America have enabled identification of the shipwreck. It reflects on some of the insights research about this event is providing about the...
Ideologies In Tension And Moments of Change: The Slave Jail At 1315 Duke Street, Alexandria, Virginia (2021)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology of Urban Dissonance: Violence, Friction, and Change" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. From 1828 until its liberation at the onset of the American Civil War in 1861, the slave jail complex built by Franklin & Armfield at 1315 Duke Street in Alexandria, Virginia facilitated a fundamental transformation in American slavery. It was used to industrialize the domestic slave trade; however, it also...
In Perpetuity: Memories, Stories, and the Material Culture of the Jackson’s Wall Site, Grand Cayman (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster reports on renewed and emergent social networks developed during two field seasons of archaeological research at the Jackson Wall site on Grand Cayman. Research is sponsored by the National Trust for the Cayman Islands, supporting the first modern terrestrial excavations intentionally centering the history of slavery on Grand Cayman. The...
In Sickness And In Health: Well-being Of Enslaved Laborers At The Hermitage Plantation (2018)
Prior to the nineteenth century, the practice of medicine was as much an art as it was a science in the Western world. By the antebellum period, European, African, African American, and Native American medical theory and practices intermingled on Southern plantations because of centuries of interaction. This study of the material culture of health and well-being at the Hermitage highlights the extent to which consumption, cultural beliefs, and incipient scientific discourse intersected to shape...
In the Shade of the Sugarcane: Detecting Illegal Trade in Jamaican Slave Quarter Sites (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. Enslaved communities imprisoned on colonial sugar plantations engaged in and fostered a web of informal economies across Jamaica, which often manifested as street markets and were frequently accused of illegality. Because the Jamaican street markets were linked to illegal trade, and because illegality in the Caribbean was primarily...
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...
Inquiry-Based Learning and the Kingsley Shelter Curriculum (2013)
Archaeologists invested in outreach and education, such as the Florida Public Archaeology Network (FPAN), are adapting to an American educational climate focused on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM)-based resources. As such, the investigation of a Kingsley Slave Cabin addition to the Project Archaeology: Investigating Shelter curriculum is a critically needed resource, allowing students from elementary schools across the southeastern United States to engage in science and math...
Integrating pollen and macrobotanical evidence to understand change in African-American lifeways at Monticello (2018)
The transition from tobacco to wheat cultivation in the late-18th century at Monticello radically altered agricultural ecology, as swidden plots gave way to permanent fields. We use macrobotanical remains and pollen as complementary evidence to assess how this shift affected plants use strategies employed by enslaved field hands and the botanical environments they maintained adjacent to their houses. The identified shift in pollen taxa does not match the pattern we previously identified for...
Interdisciplinary Investigations at Sharpley's Bottom Historic Sites Tombigbee River Multiple Resource District Alabama and Mississippi (1980)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.