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)
- The Archaeology of a Gullah Geechee Fishing Village: An Afrofuturist Landscape Perspective (2024)
- Bonanza Farms Excavated: The First Industrial Farms of North Dakota (2024)
- Cities, Seas, and Forests: Legacies of Timber and Agriculture in Chesapeake Port Cities (2024)
- A Commodity of Consequence: Rice, People, and Lowcountry Taskscapes (2024)
- For Nothing is Fixed, Forever, and Forever, and Forever: Changing Cropscapes in Colonial Barbuda (2024)
- The Giving Tree: The Story and Archaeology of the Western Redcedar on Washington’s Department of Natural Resources Lands (2024)
- Labor Landscapes of a Louisiana Sugarhouse (2024)
- Landscapes of Labor: Uncovering Montserrat’s Post-Emancipation Lime Industry, 1852-1928 (2024)
- 'Neolithic Nostalgia'? Temporalities and Interrelations of Agropastoral and Industrial Spaces in Ollagüe, Northern Chile (2024)
- Rice Berms and Deadhead Logs: Co-Creating Land and Labor on the Cape Fear (2024)
- "This Coffee Only Succeeds when the Wood is Cleared and Burned off": Slavery, Agricultural Practice, and Deforestation in 19th Century Jamaica (2024)
- This Ground Beneath My Feet: Archaeology and Art at Walker's Dairy, Barbados (2024)
- "Vast Forests of Clove": Landscape Management, Labor, and Livelihoods in 19th c. French Guiana (2024)