Identifying the South Yard: Interrogating Landscapes of Home and Work Yards Enslaved African Americans at Montpelier

Summary

Landscape analysis of slave plantations typically approaches the plantation scale, analyzing the distribution of the built environment across the plantation itself. This paper will focus on the analysis of the domestic slave quarter of James Madison's Montpelier, and how the yards, structures, and features were organized and used by the Madisons and enslaved community. Over the course of multiple field seasons , archaeologists have conducted extensive field excavations uncovering three outbuildings, three slave dwellings, a variety of features, and yard spaces. Through a landscape analysis of artifact distribution and feature location, this paper will discuss how James Madison viewed this portion of his plantation landscape as a space that demonstrated and supported his family's social status. Further, it will examine how the African American community modified and manipulated that landscape to create spatial divisions within the yardspaces and activity areas into places of work and places of home space.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2018   •
• Landscapes of Chesapeake Slavery

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Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 581