Free to Choose? Emancipation, Foodways and Belonging on Witherspoon Island

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

After emancipation, formerly enslaved people in the American Southeast encountered significant challenges while transitioning to free life. Despite many obstacles, individuals and communities chose diverse paths towards establishing new lives as free men and women. Here, we examine post-emancipation foodways through historical archaeology on Witherspoon Island, an upland cotton plantation in South Carolina, to explore how newly freed people and families formulated social, economic and ecological networks. After the Civil War, tenant farming developed at Witherspoon Island, with African American residents falling into two groups: former slaves from neighboring plantations; and former Witherspoon slaves who chose to return to their old homes after being forcibly relocated in 1862. By synthesizing the archaeological and ethnohistorical record, we explore the multi-scalar socioecological and economic networks created by the tenant farming community at Witherspoon. The research suggests that through animal husbandry, fishing, hunting, trade and exchange, the freed men and women at Witherspoon maintained connections to the land and community developed under slavery, while also establishing novel social, economic and foodways practices.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25976