Archaeologies of Enslavement

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Honerkamp. Lindsey Cochran.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Enslavement" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Thanks to a recent clear cutting approach to eliminating stands of pine-beetle-infested trees at Cannon’s Point Plantation, St. Simons Island, Georgia, an additional slave cabin settlement has been identified. A systematic survey was carried out at the site by the University of Tennessee during the summer of 2018, resulting in the recovery of domestic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Davidson.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Enslavement" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Over the course of five summer field schools, University of Florida researchers have explored the Bulow Plantation, a large sugar plantation in East Florida, founded in 1821 and destroyed by fire in 1836 during the Second Seminole War, after it was briefly transformed into a makeshift military installation called Fort Bulowville.  Two slave cabins and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Myles Sullivan.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Enslavement" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In the 18th and 19th century, landscape features like fencelines served both utilitarian and socially-charged functions in dividing up spaces on large plantations like James Madison’s Montpelier. In interpreting such boundaries, archaeologists are challenged to understand both the original intent of their construction by planters as well as how these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alan Armstrong.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Enslavement" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper presents of findings from Estate Bellevue St. John, USVI, a small-scale cotton plantation.  Cotton estates represent a distinct but understudied variant within the Caribbean plantation landscape.  This study takes advantage of the well-preserved spatial layout at Estate Bellevue to explore details of life for both planter and the enslaved.  This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anthony Martin. Warren Perry. Janet Woodruff. Jerry Sawyer.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Enslavement" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.  From the mid-18th to mid-19th century, African American communities in New England t developed their own political and cultural structure headed by elected officials known as Black Governors or Black Kings.  Black Govenors/Kings operated at the local level and performed several important social functions including heading events, resolving conflicts and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Crystal L. Ptacek. Beatrix Arendt. Fraser Neiman.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda D. Roberts Thompson.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Enslavement" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The South End Plantation located on Ossabaw Island, Georgia was operated as a cotton plantation by George Jones Kollock from 1849-1861. During this time, the land was continually modified for Kollock’s agricultural pursuits, all of which occurred through assigned tasks to enslaved individuals. Modifying and moving through the landscape allowed enslaved...

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 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 Matthew C. Greer. Scott Oliver.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lydia Wilson Marshall.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Enslavement" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Archaeological research on Maroons—that is, runaway slaves—has been largely confined to the Americas. This paper advocates a more global approach. It specifically uses two runaway slave communities in 19th-century coastal Kenya to rethink prominent interpretive themes in the field, including "Africanisms," Maroons’ connections to indigenous groups, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Deborah Marx. James P. Delgado. Joseph J Grinnan. Kyle Lent. Alexander J. DeCaro.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Enslavement" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Fieldwork conducted in 2018 concluded that Alabama’s Twelvemile Island Wreck (1BA694) was not that of the slave ship Clotilda; however, archaeologists did uncover evidence that the wreck site is just one component of a historic ship graveyard integral to the broader maritime cultural landscape  of  the  Mobile  River.   Archival  research  suggests  that ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyle Lent.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Enslavement" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Deductive reasoning and the importance of archaeological investigation to deconstruct and decipher scientific fact from popular belief.  The strategy involved with preparing and presenting evidence to document a shipwreck that has been publicly suggested to be something it is not.  As early the 1910s, recent history has suggested that the Twelvemile Island...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph J Grinnan.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Enslavement" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In 2018, a team of archaeologists from the Slave Wrecks Project (SWP), National Park Service (NPS) Southeast Archaeological Center (SEAC), NPS Submerged Resources Center (SRC), George Washington University, the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African American History and Culture (SINMAAHC), National Geographic Society, and SEARCH conducted a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindsey Cochran.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Enslavement" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Places within plantation settlements were created differentially based partially on the geometric organization of settlement spaces. Place-making within settlement spaces impacted how enslaved people covertly and overtly displayed materials with African and Caribbean roots. GIS and R-generated thessian tessellations quantify the geometry of ten such spaces...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Wilkins.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Enslavement" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This research incorporates overseers into the discussion of how constructed space and social relations informed and shaped one another on colonial and antebellum Virginia plantations. I examine how the organization, use, and meaning of spaces at multiple scales intersected with the historical constructions of race and class to identify meaningful...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen E. McIlvoy.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Enslavement" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Before the invention and spread of the modern washing machine, the task of laundry was an arduous process that took days to complete and usually fell to the women of the household. However, despite the ubiquity of their task, enslaved washerwomen generally have been disregarded in the historical study of plantation labor. During the recent reanalysis of...