Silenced Lifeways:The Archaeology of Free African-American Communities in the Indiana and Illinois Borderlands

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Silenced Lifeways:The Archaeology of Free African-American Communities in the Indiana and Illinois Borderlands," at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Prior to the Civil War free African-Americans established a series of rural farmstead communities in the southern parts of Indiana and Illinois on lands now contained on the Hoosier and Shawnee National Forests. Such settlements typically consisted of dispersed farmsteads occupied by related families centered around churches, schools, cemeteries and landscape features that helped create a shared identity. Oral histories as well as the location of such communities on lands near or bordering former slave states attest to their role in helping African-American escapees from slavery on their pathway to freedom. Over the past 20 years archaeological investigations conducted in both Indiana and Illinois have begun to break through the historical silences that surround such communities, providing a fuller picture of the daily lived experiences of those free African-Americans who deliberately placed themselves and their families in unsafe borderland areas in order to assist others in their quest for freedom.