"Pushing Against a Stone": Landscape, Generational Breadth, and Community-Oriented Archaeological Approaches in the Plantation Chesapeake

Summary

By the antebellum era enslaved communities across large tidewater Chesapeake plantations boasted deep temporal and broadly dispersed roots, enjoining residents across quarters through bonds of kinship and camaraderie that often transcended plantation boundaries.  Broad cross-plantation neighborhoods encompassed mosaics of significant places suffused with notions of community and grounded in generational investments in labor and experience, places and ties that often retain value to present-day descendants. This paper outlines some of the social and temporal mechanisms of community development particular to the Chesapeake region and suggests that community-oriented landscape approaches might be productive in archaeological interpretation beyond enslaved and liberated Chesapeake neighborhoods to parallel diasporic communities throughout the Plantation Southeast and the broader African-Atlantic.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• A Regional Retrospective Analysis of the Antebellum Atlantic Seaboard   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2016

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 580