Making Food, Making Middens, and Making Communities: Exploring the Effects of Cooking and Trash Disposal on a Virginia Plantation

Summary

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

Recent excavations at Belle Grove Plantation (Frederick County, Virginia) have identified what appears to be an outdoor cooking pit associated with one of the property’s early to mid-19th century slave quarters. While we do not know how long those enslaved at Belle Grove used this feature, eventually numerous large faunal elements (presumably the remains of communal meals) were tossed into the pit, and the area around it became incorporated into a large trash scatter that would serve as one of the site’s primary midden for the following decades. In this paper, we explore how the (un)intended effects that radiated out from these acts of cooking and trash disposal may have assembled enslaved people in ways that allowed various communities to emerge at Belle Grove. 

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2019   •
• Archaeologies of Enslavement

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 421