Making Time for Tea(wares): Slow Archaeology, Enslaved Life, and the Poetics of Consumption

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Plantation Archaeology as Slow Archaeology" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The study of enslaved people’s consumption practices often relies on ‘fast science,’ reducing these acts to a reflection of socioeconomic structures or a medium for agency and self-expression. What often gets lost is the effects these actions had. My paper builds on Édouard Glissant’s discussions of the ontological and ethical aspects of ‘slow science’ to argue that attending to what Glissant would call the poetics of consumption – how consumers and commodities came together and the effects that radiate outward from acts of consumption – allows us to see enslaved consumers as people whose actions affected the world around them. To demonstrate this, I draw on merchants’ ledgers and archaeological data from ongoing excavations at Belle Grove Plantation to discuss how enslaved people came to acquire both tea and teawares, and how this consumption affected how local economies and the institution of slavery operated in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020   •
• Plantation Archaeology as Slow Archaeology

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 420