Convergent Pathways of Enslaved Materialities: The Case of Eighteenth-Century Bermuda and Virginia

Summary

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

2019 marks the four hundredth anniversary of the arrival to the first Africans to Jamestown, Virginia's founding colony, individuals captured by English privateers from a Portuguese slaver on its way to Vera Cruz, Mexico. Many captives in the same cargo were taken the same year to Bermuda, England's other colony controlled by the same joint stock company. What happened to the Africans brought to these earliest of England's New World colonies? Archaeological evidence recovered over the last thirty years from excavations in Tidewater Virginia and Bermuda demonstrate a complex dialectic of accommodation and resistance in the material lives of the respective enslaved populations of the two colonies, a dialectic that can be best interpreted using a conception of the "innovative materiality of revitalization" first developed by Matthew Liebmann for understanding the fate of the Jemez during the period of the Pueblo revolt. This model helps explain both the increasing participation in the transatlantic consumer economy by Virginia and Bermuda enslaved people, and their important revival of West African ritual practices. The value of this model to these case studies supports a more unified approach to the study of both indigenous historical archaeology and that of the African Diaspora.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24782