The Intersecting Plantation Landscape II

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Heath. Meagan Dennison. Crystal Ptacek. Hope Smith.

Indian Camp, a plantation in the eastern Virginia piedmont, served as an outlying quarter farm for tobacco cultivation from 1730 to the 1790s. Just prior to 1800, an ordinary and retail store were built there and continued in operation into the 1840s. Since 2011, archaeologists working on the property, now known as French’s Tavern, have concentrated efforts in a field west of the surviving historic structures. The site contains a complex array of post holes, pits, piers and other features,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luke Pecoraro.

English colonization of Virginia has been characterized as boldly intrusive, spreading outquickly from the first toehold at Jamestown into the hinterlands and leading to openhostility with native peoples almost from the start. The tactics used and methods employed in colonizing Virginia were not new; many of the Jamestown venturers werethemselves involved in plantation efforts in the late 16th/early 17th centuries in Ireland.While it has long been known that there are direct historical links...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Brown. Thane Harpole.

Virginia’s elite experimented with dramatic changes to their plantations at the end of the seventeenth century, a period coinciding with increasing reliance on enslaved labor, the use of architecture and landscape design books, and increasing racialization of Africans in the colony. The enslaved African population operated within and largely built this new world, creating what Dell Upton and others refer to as a Black Landscape. Archaeological evidence of these landscapes reflects the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean Maroney. Kerri S. Barile.

In 1786, the town of Fredericksburg was just over 50 years old. The original core of town comprised just 18 blocks, and a 1759 expansion doubled its size to over 40. But the newly completed home of General George Weedon and his wife Catherine sat outside of the boundaries of this burgeoning community. As originally designed, the Sentry Box comprised a carefully designed, five-part Palladian plan with a dwelling, four symmetrical outbuildings, terraced gardens, quarters, barns, and surrounding...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kerri S. Barile.

Alexander Spotswood had a tough job. Born in Africa and of Scottish descent, he was assigned to be the English Lieutenant Governor of Virginia in 1710. Upon arrival in the colony, he immediately faced opposition from Virginia-born residents. The battles in the House of Burgesses lead Spotswood to acquire the nickname ‘Arrogante’ and gave him a taste for control. As he began to see his position under threat, he purchased a 30,000-acre tract on what was then the Virginia frontier. He named the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Terry Brock.

Examining the African American landscape during and after slavery opens the door for a broader understanding of how enslaved and tenant laborers experienced the external plantation landscape. In both instances, African Americans had to navigate these landscapes subversively. However, Emancipation changed the ways that these spaces outside the plantation were used, manipulated, and experienced. In this paper, a 19th-century plantation in St. Mary’s City, Maryland will be used to examine different...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Wilkins.

This paper explores the identification and interpretation of overseers in the archaeological record of colonial and antebellum plantations. While plantation landscapes have traditionally been split into opposing conceptions of owner and slave, white and black; this study attempts to incorporate overseers and their spaces as the intersection of those landscapes, critical to the negotiation of race and power. Archaeological studies of overseers have been relatively limited and few attempts have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Beth Pruitt.

The Wye House Plantation sits on the Wye River, which feeds into the Chesapeake Bay and connected the planter family the Lloyds to an Atlantic trade network in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The past eight summers of excavation at the plantation have focused, not on these connections, but on questions about the lived experiences of the enslaved. The institution of slavery connected them to a diasporic community and to intersecting points of contact at plantations across Maryland’’s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Terry Brock. Thank Harpole.

Inuit women were instrumental in the success of many Arctic expeditions, none more than those led by Robert E. Peary in the early years of the 20th century. But their roles, and the challenges they faced, are only infrequently documented. In 1905-06 and 1908-09 some 50 Inughuit (Polar Inuit) men, women, and children temporarily left their omes in Northwest Greenland to live and work for Peary on northern Ellesmere Island Nunavut, as he tried to reach the North Pole. Recent archaeological work at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Proebsting. Jack Gary.

Exploring the ornamental and plantation landscapes of Poplar Forest has revealed new perspectives on Thomas Jefferson’’s designs for his retreat home. These perspectives allow us to confront the impact that Jefferson’’s decisions had on the lives of the slaves who provided the labor needed to bring his agricultural and ornamental visions to reality. The works of these individuals, revealed in archaeological and written records, included episodes of extensive clearing and earthmoving along with...