Seeking Freedom in the Borderlands: Archaeological Perspectives on Maroon Societies in Florida

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Seeking Freedom in the Borderlands: Archaeological Perspectives on Maroon Societies in Florida" at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Over the past few decades, the archaeology of marronage has emerged as a distinctive subdiscipline exploring the material culture of freedom-seeking people resisting the institution of enslavement by living in the margins of colonial hegemony in the Americas. Much of the work in this area has been led by research in the Caribbean and South America, where large maroon communities developed and survived, maintaining a continuity of culture through descendants to the current day. In contrast, the major maroon communities of colonial and territorial Florida were effectively eliminated by the mid-nineteenth century and were often short-lived and ephemeral occupations, creating unique difficulties for archaeologists. Due to its geopolitical context, however, marronage in Florida was characterized by responses to enslavement not typically experienced elsewhere, with African-descendant people manning European military outposts, integrating with Indigenous communities, and developing expedient networks of communication and trade. This symposium will explore the unique characteristics and challenges of maroon archaeology in Florida with an intra-regional comparative approach, examining the recent research at some of the more significant sites in an effort to better understand the lost history of a freedom-seeking people.