Materialities of (Un)Freedom: Examining the Material Consequences of Inequality within Historical Archaeology

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Materialities of (Un)Freedom: Examining the Material Consequences of Inequality within Historical Archaeology," at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

States of oppression and “unfreedom” have existed globally for millennia; however, as Frederick Douglass observed, “No man can put a chain around the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.” The ways that systems of inequality manifest materially provide insights on the lived experiences of those involved as well as into the ideologies embedded within those systems. This session brings together papers on places that exemplify unfreedom and intense inequality, including contexts of enslavement, coerced and forced labor, class inequality, and other forms of (capitalist) oppression, to examine the breadth of material signatures of inequality. How is inequality enacted and enforced through objects and spaces? How is identity negotiated and renegotiated under circumstances of unfreedom? How do oppressed communities resist their oppression? Artifact-, landscape-, and theoretically-based approaches to this subject are welcome.