Intimate Economies: Independent Production in the Past

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin Fogle.

Craft production, hired time, personal cotton plots, theft, and diverse trade networks created a patchwork of economic opportunities for several hundred slaves on Witherspoon Island, a 19th century cotton plantation in the Pee Dee region of South Carolina. This paper explores the impact of household and community involvement in a myriad of economic practices that were at times sanctioned, expressly forbidden, or tacitly accepted by the plantation management. When the archaeological and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James A. Nyman.

French colonial Fort Rosalie, situated in present day Natchez, Mississippi, was the site of intimate cross cultural exchange. Living in the frontier at a distant outpost of the Louisiana colony, the soldiers felt comfortable incorporating Indigenous foods into their diets, eating from Natchezan vessels, and even taking Native wives. Far from idyllic however, the European and Indigenous inhabitants of the Natchez Bluffs were swept up in larger paradoxes of globalization spurred by increasing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marika Hyttinen. Timo Ylimaunu. Titta Kallio-Seppä. Paul R. Mullins.

The town of Oulu, northern Finland, had one of the northernmost pitch tar mills in global scale. Thousands of barrels of tar were cooked into a pitch tar in the island of Pikisaari annually during the 18th and 19th centuries. The island has been specialized production site for pitch tar and ship building during the 17th and 19th centuries and metal industry at 20th century. Thus, the pitch was not the only product of the mill area. There have been found artifacts, like tools and stone ware and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Reilly.

Situated on the fringes of the plantation landscape, the "poor whites" of Barbados occupied unique spaces within local and global capitalist networks during and after the period of slavery.  Historically and contemporarily portrayed as being irrelevant within broader economic systems of production, a discourse of marginalization coupled with stereotypes of idleness has severed them from broader Barbadian and global socioeconomics.  This paper addresses the power dynamics inherent in identifying,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Flora Vilches.

Rock salt exploitation in the oases of San Pedro de Atacama is one among many expressions of capitalist expansion in Latin America. Except for mining concessions, historical documentation of these practices is virtually nonexistent, although material remains and former actors in the mining process still survive. In this paper, we present archaeological evidence of rock salt mining sites of different scale and kind of exploitation that coexist throughout the 20th century. Such differences show...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan J Bradley.

Since the Colonial period, inhabitants of the Outer Banks of North Carolina processed right whales to augment their existence until the turn of the 20th century.  What began as drift-whale scavenging became organized hunts.  Each spring, the locals kept lookouts from high dunes and launched boats from shore in pursuit of whales.  The historical record indicates that they did so for over two centuries with moderate success.  Locating archaeological signatures along this coast is problematic due...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dwayne Scheid.

Within the Barbadian sugar plantations of the 18th and 19th century, there existed multiple forms of economy. The typical economy, as described by historical texts, consists of sugar plantations exchanging sugar and molasses for goods from England and its North American colonies as well as for slaves from Africa. However, within the sugar plantation complex, a dense and layered sub-economy was impacting and being impacted by the day-to-day operations of the plantations themselves. At the core of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allison J.M. McGovern.

This paper explores the daily practices within two 19th century Native Algonquin households at Indian Fields, a Montaukett village in eastern Long Island, New York. Though geographically distant from the white settlements of East Hampton Town, the Montaukett residents of these households were intimately entangled in local and global economic activities and social networks. Their participation in whaling, seafaring, and agriculture, the dominant economic activities, often led to absences from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Palus.

A dramatic investment in the infrastructure of Georgetown followed the establishment of a single municipal government for the City of Washington in 1871, and the abolishment of Georgetown’s charter as an independent municipality. Establishing new street grades in this context resulted in the near-burial of homes in an African-American section of Georgetown called Herring Hill, which became an unofficial dump for fill excavated during infrastructure work. Beginning in February 2011, The District...