Co-Producing Space: Relational Approaches to Agrarian Landscapes, Labor, Commodities, and Communities

Part of: Society for Historical Archaeology 2024

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Co-Producing Space: Relational Approaches to Agrarian Landscapes, Labor, Commodities, and Communities," at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

This session brings together scholars working at the intersection of landscape, food, and labor studies within historical archaeology. We will explore the following questions: what kinds of labor and knowledge go into producing agricultural landscapes that become recognizable as such?; in what historical circumstances do plants become commodities?; how do different forms of labor (enslaved, free, indentured, migratory) and knowledges (African, Indigenous, European, American) work together to produce agricultural landscapes with their associated infrastructures, be they plantations, farms, gardens, or other sites of organized crop production? We conceptualize producers, products, and places of production as mutually constitutive: taking inspiration from Anna Tsing (2011, 2015) and Sarah Besky (2013), among others, we propose a multispecies approach to the study of taskscapes, recognizing that the life of a given plant shapes both landscapes and the everyday lives of laborers, allowing us to think relationally and agentically about landscapes, plants, and people.

Other Keywords
Agriculture • Labor • Landscape • Palynology • Industrial Sites • Capitalism • Slavery • Environmental Archaeology • Plantations • Sugar Plantation

Geographic Keywords
Caribbean • South America • Southeast • Louisiana • Southeastern United States • Chesapeake Bay • Northern Chile • Upper Midwest / Great Plains • Lowcountry, Atlantic Coastal Southeastern USA • Northwest US

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-13 of 13)

  • Documents (13)
Documents
  • The Archaeology of a Gullah Geechee Fishing Village: An Afrofuturist Landscape Perspective (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jodi A. Barnes.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Co-Producing Space: Relational Approaches to Agrarian Landscapes, Labor, Commodities, and Communities", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In 1877, Isaac Hume acquired a hundred-foot lot on South Island at the mouth of Winyah Bay in Georgetown County, South Carolina. He was followed by Maria Smith, Robert Ellison, and other African Americans as they imagined possible futures. These Gullah Geechee fishermen,...

  • Bonanza Farms Excavated: The First Industrial Farms of North Dakota (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristen R. Fellows. David R. Hubin.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Co-Producing Space: Relational Approaches to Agrarian Landscapes, Labor, Commodities, and Communities", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Bonanza farms are iconic of and central to the white settlement of North Dakota, but were surprisingly short lived (beginning in the 1870s, larger holdings were being dissolved by the 1890s). These large agroindustrial operations cultivated tens of thousands of acres in...

  • Cities, Seas, and Forests: Legacies of Timber and Agriculture in Chesapeake Port Cities (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Chelsea Cohen.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Co-Producing Space: Relational Approaches to Agrarian Landscapes, Labor, Commodities, and Communities", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. As the forests of the Chesapeake were cleared for tobacco and wheat agriculture, timber consumption reformed both agricultural and port landscapes. The systematic clearing of timber opened land for Euroamerican-style open-field agriculture while directly contributing to the...

  • A Commodity of Consequence: Rice, People, and Lowcountry Taskscapes (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only David T. Palmer.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Co-Producing Space: Relational Approaches to Agrarian Landscapes, Labor, Commodities, and Communities", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century transformation of c. 120,000 acres of cypress and bottomland hardwood forests in the coastal region spanning southern North Carolina to northern Florida, (the Lowcountry), for commercial rice production was only possible...

  • For Nothing is Fixed, Forever, and Forever, and Forever: Changing Cropscapes in Colonial Barbuda (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Edith Gonzalez.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Co-Producing Space: Relational Approaches to Agrarian Landscapes, Labor, Commodities, and Communities", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In the mid-seventeenth century, the island of Barbuda was established as a plantation under a land grant from the English Crown. Over the course of two hundred and fifty years or so, managers of the Barbuda Plantation tried various strategies to produce a profit from the...

  • The Giving Tree: The Story and Archaeology of the Western Redcedar on Washington’s Department of Natural Resources Lands (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Hannah C Russell.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Co-Producing Space: Relational Approaches to Agrarian Landscapes, Labor, Commodities, and Communities", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Washington Department of Natural Resources (DNR) manages over 2.4 million acres of trust lands, which must generate revenue for the state’s beneficiaries. Therefore, DNR harvests three-billion board-feet of lumber annually. Long before these forests were managed by DNR, they...

  • Labor Landscapes of a Louisiana Sugarhouse (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven J. Filoromo. Paul D. Jackson.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Co-Producing Space: Relational Approaches to Agrarian Landscapes, Labor, Commodities, and Communities", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Throughout southern Louisiana, the lands were subject to intensive agricultural cultivation, be it through cotton or rice, but mainly, sugar. The sugarhouse was a central node to early industrial production in the US Southeast for the many enslaved laborers and immigrant...

  • Landscapes of Labor: Uncovering Montserrat’s Post-Emancipation Lime Industry, 1852-1928 (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha M Ellens.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Co-Producing Space: Relational Approaches to Agrarian Landscapes, Labor, Commodities, and Communities", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper presents an historical archaeological analysis of Montserrat’s late 19th to early 20th-century citrus lime industry, which emerged in response to the demise of the sugar-based plantation economy on the Caribbean island. Following the networks of lime circulation,...

  • 'Neolithic Nostalgia'? Temporalities and Interrelations of Agropastoral and Industrial Spaces in Ollagüe, Northern Chile (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Francisco Rivera.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Co-Producing Space: Relational Approaches to Agrarian Landscapes, Labor, Commodities, and Communities", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In Ollagüe, a Quechua Indigenous community in northern Chile, abandoned agropastoral and industrial sites exist alongside each other as witnesses of the complex nuances of capitalist expansion and industrializing projects. Sulfur and borax mining modified agricultural...

  • Rice Berms and Deadhead Logs: Co-Creating Land and Labor on the Cape Fear (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily A Schwalbe.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Co-Producing Space: Relational Approaches to Agrarian Landscapes, Labor, Commodities, and Communities", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Studies of antebellum rice plantations in the Southeastern United States tend to center on South Carolina and Georgia, largely because they were the most extensive land holdings in terms of acreage, production, and enslaved labor. One area where rice agriculture is...

  • "This Coffee Only Succeeds when the Wood is Cleared and Burned off": Slavery, Agricultural Practice, and Deforestation in 19th Century Jamaica (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only James A. Delle.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Co-Producing Space: Relational Approaches to Agrarian Landscapes, Labor, Commodities, and Communities", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In the opening decades of the 19th century, Jamaica experienced its first coffee boom. As planters raced to create productive plantations in the eastern and central highlands of the island, they employed gangs of enslaved laborers to clear cut an untold number of acres of old...

  • This Ground Beneath My Feet: Archaeology and Art at Walker's Dairy, Barbados (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristen M. Delatour. Matthew C. Reilly. Annalee Davis.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Co-Producing Space: Relational Approaches to Agrarian Landscapes, Labor, Commodities, and Communities", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Unearthing Voices explores plantation life in Barbados through a collaboration between archaeologists and an artist working to bridge the materialities of race-based slavery into the contemporary, post-Emancipation Caribbean. At Walker’s Dairy in St. George, Barbados, the...

  • "Vast Forests of Clove": Landscape Management, Labor, and Livelihoods in 19th c. French Guiana (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth C. Clay.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Co-Producing Space: Relational Approaches to Agrarian Landscapes, Labor, Commodities, and Communities", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Clove was an unlikely success among the many 19th c. economic strategies undertaken by French administrators in Guyane, the only South American colony within the empire. The implementation of clove plantations resulted from a combination of historical and geographical factors...