Intersections of Place, Landscape, and Spirit at Wye House

Summary

The Wye House Plantation sits on the Wye River, which feeds into the Chesapeake Bay and connected the planter family the Lloyds to an Atlantic trade network in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The past eight summers of excavation at the plantation have focused, not on these connections, but on questions about the lived experiences of the enslaved. The institution of slavery connected them to a diasporic community and to intersecting points of contact at plantations across Maryland’’s Eastern Shore. Using archaeological evidence and the autobiographical writings of Frederick Douglass, who was enslaved there as a child, this paper will examine the sense of place and networks of the enslaved at Wye House. These networks are formed in the context of multiple Lloyd plantations, the founding of surrounding towns by former slaves, and religious practices that connect the landscape at Wye House to a global system of spiritual resistance.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2014   •
• The Intersecting Plantation Landscape II

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): SYM-65,08