The Role of Landscape in Power Dynamics of the Past: An Example from Eighteenth-Century Piedmont Virginia

Summary

The neighborhood surrounding historic Indian Camp plantation located in Virginia’s eastern piedmont helps provide an interpretation about past identity formation and power dynamics. Using public records and ArcGIS, I locate this historical community to explore networks in which these individuals were involved. Historic land patents surrounding the Indian Camp property were given a spatial quality, and based on resulting maps, research has identified a dynamic community. Through the 1720s and 1730s, powerful, influential men with existing social, political, and economic connections in the tidewater were establishing themselves as piedmont neighbors whose plantations increased their wealth. These individuals were prominent public office holders and slave owners and were connected to each other with a complex network of kin and friendship systems. My study supports previous Chesapeake scholarship in that it shows how a particular neighborhood’s influential citizens helped create a Virginia identity and how greatly land contributed to that identity.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Us and Them: Immigration and Identity   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2013

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 608