Slavery (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hayden Bassett.

On the large-scale sugar plantations of the Caribbean, enslaved Africans were forced into dense communities on the scale of small urban townships. In many cases, the "slave village" site was allotted by the plantation owner, though the internal composition was largely left to the choices and dynamics of the enslaved community. This poster summarizes the findings from a recent archaeological survey of the slave village of Good Hope estate, an 18th/early-19th-century sugar plantation in northern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katelyn Kean.

This poster presents the findings of an evaluation of the ways in which museums interpret and present slavery throughout Maryland and Virginia to the public. By comparing the various themes amplified when presenting slavery in a museum setting today, aspects of slavery the public is able to understand after visiting are assessed. To gauge this, a survey was administered to visitors at each of the following sites: Mount Vernon, Colonial Williamsburg, Monticello, Montpellier, and Sotterley...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara E. Bon-Harper. Kyle W. Edwards.

The rediscovery of the previously unknown plantation house at James Monroe’s Highland has provided a new anchor to interpret the historic landscape of the 535-acre property. As much as the discovery of the Monroe house has grabbed the headlines and facilitated discussion about President Monroe’s place in American history, research into the landscapes of slavery, including dwellings, yards, and workspaces, stands to contribute even more to our understanding of social order on the plantation and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bria Brooks.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the 19th century, a fort and independent settlement of enslavement escapees and their descendants emerged along the Apalachicola River. Prospect Bluff, which eventually became to be known as “Negro Fort”, was a place where Maroons resisted the institutions of slavery. Prospect Bluff hosted a vibrant community of Maroons. At its peak it was home to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Douglas W. Sanford.

Scholars from the fields of archaeology, architectural history, and history have established common categories and cultural conditions for the building types used to house enslaved African Americans in Virginia between the 17th century and the American Civil War.  This paper examines architectural, political, and social constructs deemed critical to understanding both the diversity and the patterning of Virginia slave housing.  Recent research regarding surviving slave buildings, together with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lori Lee.

This presentation explores intersectionality in the context of health consumerism in antebellum central Virginia. Health consumerism incorporates the modern sense of patients’ involvement in their own health care decisions and the degree of access enslaved African Americans had to resources that shaped their health and well-being experiences. To emphasize the multilayered nature of health and illness, this analysis engages Margaret Lock and Nancy Scheper-Hughes "three bodies model." The three...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jillian Galle. Fraser Neiman.

The DAACS Research Consortium is a novel and ambitious experiment in the use of web technologies to increase the quality and comparability of archaeological data, to promote collaboration and data sharing among diverse archaeologists, to encourage and comparative analysis and synthesis, and ultimately to advance our understanding  of early modern slave societies using archaeological data. In this paper we sketch the specific strategies that DRC collaborators are developing to achieve these goals...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vicky Oelze. Wang Xueye.

For two decades, isotope biogeochemistry has allowed for the identification of first generation victims of the transatlantic slave trade in the Americas based on highly radiogenic strontium isotope ratios discovered in archaeological human remains from slavery contexts. However, as strontium isotope baseline data from most of Africa was absent these high strontium ratios were merely linked to sub-Saharan Africa at large, with little to no possibility of nuance regarding the actual regions...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jillian Galle. Lynsey Bates.

Hand-carved ceramic discs excavated from historic-period sites across North America and the Caribbean suggest the widespread growth of gaming culture during the third quarter of the 18th century. From Spanish missions and French forts to villages of enslaved people across the British, French, and Spanish colonial domains, people fashioned discs from flat portions of ceramic vessels for use in a variety of games. We begin by exploring the production and use of hand-carved ceramic gaming discs of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Garrett Fesler.

In this paper I examine how archaeologists make sense of the archaeological record at sites occupied by enslaved Africans in the Chesapeake region during the antebellum period.  In particular, I offer an alternative explanation for some assemblages of artifacts that are routinely interpreted as African Diasporic spirit caches.  In addition to sharing similar cultural belief systems, enslaved Africans experienced comparable levels of privation.  Poverty may have motivated some enslaved Africans...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles Robinson.

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.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles H. Fairbanks.

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.

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Tutchener.

In 1732, at the height of the slave trade on St. Eustatius in the Caribbean, the Dutch shipped more than 2,700 people from Africa, making the island integral to the Second West India Trading Company’s influence in the Caribbean. This site consists of a series of 10 dry built stonewalls that run down a large valley on the side of the Quill (602m in height) which is a dormant volcano located within a National Park of the same name. The walls were built either to assist in the minimization of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Heath.

Laboring people, especially the enslaved, are often considered to be archaeologically invisible during the first century of settlement in the colonial Chesapeake. In this paper I focus on key aspects of landscapes—fields, forests, and rivers—to consider how a landscape approach can illuminate the daily practice of enslaved Africans and indentured servants in the 17th century. While the focus on productive labor was tobacco cultivation that underpinned the economy, alternate economies dependent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth C. Clay.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Enslavement" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Habitation la Caroline - a 19th c. spice plantation in upland French Guiana - was run by the labor of over 100 enslaved people at abolition in 1848. This paper presents results from survey and excavation undertaken in the slave village of this plantation in 2018, which was the first in-depth study of a 19th c. domestic quarter for enslaved Africans in this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sophie Minor.

This is a poster submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This study explores ongoing research at the military site of Fort Snelling at Bdote located in St. Paul, Minnesota. This study focuses on the lives and roles of enslaved African Americans at the Fort between the fort’s construction in the 1820s to emancipation in 1863. Specifically, this study focuses on the Commandant’s House kitchen area where enslaved individuals are known to have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carter Clinton.

This is an abstract from the "Community Engaged Bioarchaeology: Centering Descendants" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation focuses on redefining ethical frameworks in bioarchaeology and anthropological genetics, particularly when working with African American communities. Utilizing a “shared authority” approach, the talk argues for the community’s role as not merely subjects but active collaborators and decision-makers. Case studies...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lynsey A. Bates.

At the household level, analysis of material culture recovered from Caribbean plantation villages has revealed internal groups with differential access to resources. The dynamic economic systems that enslaved people developed necessarily depended on local expectations of labor and subsistence cultivation, as well as Atlantic shifts in commodity prices and political control. Expanding on household studies, I assess marketing strategies between plantation communities by tracing how imported goods...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenneth L. Brown.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "First Steps on a Long Corridor: The Gullah Geechee and the Formation of a Southern African American Landscape" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. When compared with other African Americans the Gullah Geechee are generally described as unique and relatively culturally homogeneous. Their uniqueness has been attributed to the operation of a number of forces from their isolated environment to the labor regime...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalie Mooney.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Magnolia Grove is a nineteenth-century town house property in Greensboro, Alabama. It functioned as a largely self-sufficient farming operation with around 25 acres of land and multiple slaves living and working on site. Because of these features, Magnolia Grove was used as a case study in comparison with other plantation landscapes. In short, this project is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalie Mooney.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Enslavement" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Magnolia Grove is an early-mid nineteenth century town house property in Greensboro, Alabama and it functioned as a largely self-sufficient farming operation with around 25 acres of land and multiple slaves living on site. Because of these features Magnolia Grove can be viewed as a smaller contained parallel to other plantations owned by Isaac Croom. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen McIlvoy.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Several seasons of excavation at Kingsley Plantation, in Duval County Florida, have yielded a large, multi-component dataset that spans both domestic and industrial components of the plantation. The enslaved Africans and African Americans at Kingsley Plantation engaged with their material worlds in a variety of different ways, as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Davidson.

Zephaniah Kingsley, a British planter and slave trader living in Spanish Florida, was married to Anta Madgigine Jai, an African Senegambian woman, with whom he had four biracial children.  Kingsley, in the context of his own time and given his personal history was decidedly Afrocentric in his later life, remorseful at the end of his life for his past actions as slave trader and owner, and certainly sympathetic to Africans, both enslaved and free, as individuals and to their collective...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew C Greer.

When enslaved individuals fell ill, a plethora of cures were available from various sources.  For instance, a planter could have a local doctor treat an enslaved woman, or she could treat herself through the use of medicines she purchased or plants she gathered.  Whatever choice she made, however, did not occur in a vacuum.  Rather, the social connections and relationships that structured her daily life shaped the way in which she sought to heal herself.  So far, unfortunately, the interaction...

DOCUMENT Citation Only michael lucas. Kristin O'Connell. Susan Winchell-Sweeney.

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...