Tactics and Strategies of Race and Class: Overseer and Enslaved Spatialities on Virginia Plantations.

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Enslavement" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

This research incorporates overseers into the discussion of how constructed space and social relations informed and shaped one another on colonial and antebellum Virginia plantations. I examine how the organization, use, and meaning of spaces at multiple scales intersected with the historical constructions of race and class to identify meaningful distinctions and similarities between the spaces created for and by slaves and overseers. Data are compared from five 18th- and 19th-century overseer and slave quartering sites on Virginia plantations. Overseers were distinguished from and elevated above slaves by plantation owners through the placement, quality, size, and arrangement of their spaces; but invested little in making those spaces their own. The enslaved more actively appropriated plantation spaces on their own terms. These differences led to the development of distinct spatialities on plantation contexts that simultaneously reflected and shaped constructions of race and class.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2019   •
• Archaeologies of Enslavement

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 227