Enriching the Narrative: Slow Archaeology and the Interpretation of Life at Kingsley Plantation

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.

Kingsley Plantation holds a pioneering place in African Diaspora archaeology as the site where plantation slavery was first intentionally examined. However, initial excavations in the 1960s and 1980s were limited in scope and resulted in few meaningful interpretations of plantation life. In 2006, a team from the University of Florida began a project to revisit the site and reassess our understanding of enslaved life in Florida in the early 19th century. Areas excavated throughout eight field seasons included four slave cabins, a sugar mill, a well, a barn, a cemetery, two trash middens, and a possible guest quarters near the main house. Over 40,000 artifacts and more than 65 individual features yielded much information about the materiality of daily life and ideological practices amongst enslaved persons at Kingsley Plantation. This paper explores how the richness of data gathered using the slow archaeology approach has enhanced interpretive efforts at Kingsley Plantation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

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PaperId(s): 713