Black Studies and Archaeology

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Ibarrola.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Black Studies and Archaeology" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In her 1997 book Scenes of Subjection, writer Saidiya Hartman examined the possibilities for resistance and transformation manifest in Black performance and everyday practice both pre and post-emancipation. Her examination is couched in a deep skepticism of the usefulness and relevance of agency in the study of slave power, questioning what...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luciana Alves Costa.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Black Studies and Archaeology" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. To date, the archaeology program at the Federal University of Sergipe, in northeastern Brazil, doesn’t offer an African Diaspora course at undergraduate level. Such an absence points to the epistemic violence pervasive in the teaching of archaeology, particularly blatant in a region with a predominantly Black population. In this work, I intend...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zoë Crossland.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Black Studies and Archaeology" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Drawing on work by Alexander G. Weheliye and Achille Mbembe this paper considers the ways in which Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben’s notions of biopower and biopolitics have been theorized in relation to Western European modernity and forms of sovereignty over life. What kind of challenge is posed to these genealogies when we consider...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Delande C. Justinvil.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Black Studies and Archaeology" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. “The despair and deplorable conditions within which the black community continued into the realm of death and burial.” While Steven J. Richardson offered these words in 1989, their essence still rings true today. Over the past decade, skeletal remains of nearly thirty individuals have been discovered underneath the 3300 Block of Q Street in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew C. Greer.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Black Studies and Archaeology" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Studies of plantation landscapes often focus on how enslavers used panoptical lines of sight to control and discipline enslaved people. While this provides powerful ways of theorizing plantations, other aspects of plantation landscapes have gone understudied. More specifically, if we combine archaeological landscapes studies with Black studies’...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandra M McDougle.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Black Studies and Archaeology" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In 1793 the Vincendiere family fled Saint Domingue with 12 of their enslaved, and settled on a plantation in Frederick, Maryland known as “L’Hermitage". Previous archaeological interpretations at L’Hermitage focused on the Vincendieres attempts at a French-Caribbean model of enslavement in a predominantly German-Protestant community, as well as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Terrance M. Weik.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Black Studies and Archaeology" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Recent U.S. protests over George Floyd’s death and racial health disparities emerging from COVID 19 are the latest of many calls for anti-racist justice that have been pondered by Black studies and activists for a long time. These pressing traumas have led people to call into question their beliefs about their capacities for survival and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabby Omoni Hartemann.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Black Studies and Archaeology" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Considering the urgent need to decolonize the field of archaeology, this work attempts to reformulate theoretical and methodological archaeological approaches based on Afroguianese and Afrodiasporic conceptions of time, space, materiality and knowledge. This re-understanding of the field of archaeology was provoked and defined by my own place as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brittany L. Brown.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Black Studies and Archaeology" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This study centers on four historical African American cemeteries in Jacksonville, Florida: Memorial, Sunset Memorial, Pinehurst, and Mount Olive. Collectively, these cemeteries contain thousands of African American burials. Contrary to the local government’s critique of these cemeteries as ‘abandoned and neglected’ spaces; interviews with...