Forgetting, Hybridity, Revitalization, and Persistence: A Model for Understanding the Archaeology of Enslaved African Ritual Practice in the Early Chesapeake

Summary

The topic of ritual practices among the enslaved population of the early Chespeake has been extensively examined,, most procatively by scholars such as Patricia Samford ,who have attempted to link what is known about the importation of captive Africans from historical sources to physical evidence encountered at the living sites of the enslaved in particular places during specific periods.  This paper develops a model, combining recent efforts to incorporate memory work, notably forgetting, into the conception of early colonial identities, with other postcolonial archaeology that reconsiders the nature of revitalization movements as first described by anthropologist Anthony F.C. Wallace,  It is argued that this model works very well to account for the existing evidence for ritual practices, occuring and reoccuring at quarters of the enslaved. Artifactual evidence for these practices, resulting from a kind of revitalization, is presented from a number of seventeeth and eighteenth-century quarters excavated in Tidewater Virginia.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions) 2016   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2016

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 529