Creating Context: Analyzing Legacy Documentary Data to Understand the Emergence of Enslaved Societies at Flowerdew Hundred Plantation

Summary

This is an abstract from the ""Re-excavating" Legacy Collections" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

By late 1619, 15 of the first 25 enslaved Africans imported into British North America were laboring at Flowerdew Hundred, a thousand acre plantation on the James River in Virginia. They joined indentured Europeans, neighboring Weanock Indians, and elite European landowners in shaping the mid-17th century expansion of plantation settlements across the Chesapeake, an expansion which led to the emergence of a tobacco plantation labor force comprised almost entirely of enslaved Africans and their descendants by 1700. Since the 1970s, archaeological research at Flowerdew has produced hundreds of thousands of artifacts and dozens of linear feet of unbound field records and maps. A new project led by the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (www.daacs.org) is re-analyzing collections from four of the earliest and most significant 17th-century archaeological sites at Flowerdew. We describe the protocols used to parse these documents into a relational PostgreSQL database that allows us to directly link legacy field data to related artifacts, images, and maps. We also illustrate how the standardized digital data produced by DAACS will enable students, scholars, and the public to advance our understanding of the multicultural dynamics behind the emergence of a slave society in British North America.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• "Re-excavating" Legacy Collections   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23602