Geospatial Interpretations of Enslaved Landscapes in the Antebellum Georgia Lowcountry

Summary

This project uses geospatial landscape theory to explore how enslaved people living in settlements on the Sapelo Plantation signaled their African and Caribbean roots through overt and covert materials and landscape patterns in Bush Camp Field and Behavior settlements. Enslaved people at the Sapelo Plantation were likely granted higher levels of relative independence, resulting in a different relationship with the landscape than enslaved people at contemporaneous lowcountry plantations. I hypothesize that the formative factors that created such an intricate network of places on the Sapelo Plantation landscape stem from three major variables: (1) the use of the task system at Sapelo Plantation for organizing labor; (2) the agricultural, political, and economic uniqueness of the late-antebellum Georgia plantations, including the impact of the cessation of the global slave trade; (3) and the impact of the Igbo Landing Rebellion. Throughout the antebellum south, planters defined how certain spaces were to be used by slaves; enslaved people created and cultivated places. The purpose of this research is to identify the location of previously unknown non-tabby slave cabins at Sapelo Plantation to understand how the three variables impacted slaves’ use of the landscape leading to ethnogenesis of Gullah Geechee culture on Sapelo Island, Georgia.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22270